Urban Functional Area and Its Visualization in the Era of Big Data

The study of urban functional area can test the rationality of urban land use and optimize the urban spatial structure. Taking the urban area of Beijing as an example, this paper studies the structure of urban functional area based on the kernel density analysis method by using geographic information system (GIS) technique and the point of interest (POI) data. The results show that the catering services in Beijing are mostly concentrated in the city center, while few of them are distributed in the suburbs. Residential areas are separated relatively even in spatial, there is high distribution density in most district area. Based on the demand of urban residential, residential areas are accompanied with parks and squares, and these two types of data have almost the same spatial distribution features. Shopping malls are mainly distributed in the city center, which is interconnected with the local consumption level. Hospitals are necessarily located in every region. To sum up, the analysis result demonstrates that the distribution pattern is highly centralized and sparsely dispersed in the surrounding areas with less coverage, which shows that the functional land use in Beijing is relatively saturated in the downtown area, and is still developing in the suburb areas.