The Scale, Logic and Structure of Intra-urban Place Communities Based on Place Niche Theory

Spatial agglomeration phenomena on the earth's surface permeate in various fields of the natural and human world, yet their researches in human society are relatively few with the focus mainly on the economic concept of "industrial clusters". Precise quantitative descriptions, in-depth logical analyses and overall systematic explanations are lacked in various intra-urban spatial agglomeration phenomena. Using over 10 million POIs in the mainland China, 18 grid network models of 9 grid scales based on two kinds of spatial relationships (co-location/adjacent) are constructed in this article. 23 typical place communities are extracted based on complex network analysis, and four types including 11 sub-categories of agglomeration patterns are summarized. Drawing on the concept of "ecological niche", we further propose the theory of "place niche" and analyze the logic and structure of intra-urban place communities within its framework. This study extends the spatial scales and dominating factors of the agglomeration phenomenon research.