Location analysis of retail stores in Changchun, China: A street centrality perspective

This paper examines the location pattern of various retail stores in Changchun, China. The centrographic method, the nearest neighbor index and the proximity to CBD are used to provide some baseline analyses of their spatial distributions. Major findings are derived from the street centrality indices measured in terms of a node's closeness, betweenness and straightness on the road network. The kernel density estimation (KDE) converts both store locations and centrality values at nodes to one unit (raster pixel) for correlation analysis. Results indicate that street centrality captures location advantage in a city and plays a crucial role in shaping the intraurban variation of commercial land use intensity. Specifically, specialty stores value various centralities most, followed by department stores, supermarkets, consumer product stores, furniture stores, and construction material stores. Among the stores with correlation coefficients above 0.5, specialty stores favor closeness most, department stores and supermarkets prefer betweenness, and consumer product stores value straightness most.