Yu Wei’s research while affiliated with Taiyuan University of Technology and other places

Administrative divisions are regional divisions of the state for the purpose of hierarchical administration. In recent years, the process of urbanization has greatly promoted the urban development. This development is not only reflected in the expansion of urban areas but also in economic and social patterns. All these changes affect the way the urban operates. Then, a concern arising from the changing urban dynamics is that whether current administrative division accords with urban development? Existing studies conceptualize the urban space as the environment created by human activities, and elaborate the importance of urban boundaries respecting to human activities in urban management. Following this concept, we delineate the urban interior boundaries formed by human activities. Specifically, taking Xi’an in Shaanxi Province of China as an example, this study first explores the region-based human crowd mobility patterns to verify that human mobility can establish a stable correlation between regions, or capture the objective correlations between regions. Then, the above human crowd patterns have been found to be applicable for mining unusual urban regions from the perspective of anomaly detection, and empirical evidence has found that these regions are of great significance for understanding the urban spatial structure. Finally, we employ the community detection technology to naturally delimit the urban interior boundaries formed by human mobility, and make a comparison with the official urban boundaries. Some unexpected communities that are closely linked due to human activities appear from the results, and these findings help the urban planners re-examine the administrative division.