Revisiting urban scaling through street-based hotspots across 360 Chinese cities

China has undergone exceptionally rapid urbanization in the past few decades, but it now faces significant challenges related to uneven development across different regions. Using a triangulated irregular network (TIN)-based method, we extracted street-based hotspots across 360 Chinese cities. This allows us to analyze how development differs across sub-regions within each city. We identified urban scaling laws for three key attributes—number of street junctions, gross domestic product (GDP), and population—across three spatial units: hotspots, non-hotspots, and the city as a whole. Our results reveal a clear scaling divergence, with cities under 1 million and over 5 million people exhibiting greater spatial disparities between hotspot and non-hotspot areas. This suggests that spatial disparities tends to be more pronounced in both smaller and larger cities in China. Furthermore, we applied scale-adjusted metropolitan indicators (SAMIs) to rank cities based on internal disparities, reinforcing our findings across different city groups. By establishing a functionally meaningful and consistent spatial structure, our method offers deeper insights into intra-city disparities and supports more scale-sensitive, context-aware urban policies within a broader urban system.