Urban Food Takeaway Vitality: A New Technique to Assess Urban Vitality

As one of the most important criteria for measuring the quality of urban life and the environment, urban vitality has become the focus of urban-related research and related disciplines with an increasing number of advocates for the rapid and harmonious development of urban cities. Urban takeaway can represent urban vitality, but studies have not investigated this in a quantitative manner. Furthermore, current studies rarely focus on or even mention the urban food takeaway vitality generated by the spatial distribution of urban takeaway. This study first calculated the vitality of urban takeaways based on the urban takeaway distribution, building footprint, Open Street Map (OSM) data, and the Rapidly Exploring Random Tree (RRT). Then, the urban vitality was obtained using Tencent-Yichuxing data and night-time light data, followed by a spatial correlation analysis between the urban takeaway vitality and urban vitality. Finally, the results for Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou were compared, and the following conclusions were drawn: (1) there is a significant spatial correlation between the urban takeaway vitality and urban vitality, but the correlation varies in different cities at different times; and (2) even in the same city, different road and building densities have an impact on the correlation. The urban takeaway vitality proposed in this study can be used as a new index to evaluate the urban vitality, which has important theoretical and practical significance for the sustainable development of future urban cities.