Live-Work-Play Centers of Chinese cities: Identification and temporal evolution with emerging data

The Live-Work-Play (LWP) center, as a more comprehensive profile of a city center, has attracted increasing attention in recent years. This paper proposes a straightforward framework for identifying and evaluating LWP centers using ubiquitously available points of interest (POIs) as a proxy for urban function. The framework is then applied to 285 Chinese cities. The results show that 35 Chinese cities in 2014 had polycentric urban structures, increasing from 23 cities in 2009. The temporal evolution of the LWP centers of Chinese cities can be better understood as three types of evolution, differentiated by the number of LWP centers, their morphology and location. First, more polycentric cities emerged in 2014 in comparison with 2009. Second, the morphological change type can be further classified as “relative dispersion”, “relative concentration”, and “absolute concentration”. Third, the location change type can be classified into five types: displacement, division, fusion, emerging, and recession. In the final experiment, the regression results show that larger population and greater road junction density significantly contribute to LWP center formation.