Strengthening ecosystem services through industrial upgrading in city components: Insights from restaurants in China

Since the Industrial Revolution, industrialization has improved city production efficiency and reduced costs, promoting sustainable urban development. Despite rapid progress in city industrialization research, quantitative analysis of its evolution process remains challenging. Using restaurants as a case study, this study uses culturomics, a quantitative method for exploring social evolution through digital text data, to quantify the industrialization evolution of city components from 1981 to 2020 in China and explore the changes in the ecosystem services they provide. Using cluster analysis, we divided restaurants into three types: modern quick-service restaurants (MQSRs), traditional quick-service restaurants (TQSRs), and full-service restaurants (FSRs). The results indicate that Chinese restaurants have rapidly evolved towards industrialization since 1981, with an increase of 33.7 % in the component industrial level (CIL), which is the average industrial levels of the three restaurant types. Among all the restaurants, the proportion of MQSRs has increased to 28 %, surpassing TQSRs. Moreover, MQSRs provide more ecosystem services, 1.7-times greater than TQSRs. As the CIL has improved, the ecosystem services provided by restaurants have increased by 27 %. The increasing variety of MQSRs, people's active choices, and socioeconomic factors have further promoted industrialization. However, this progress has also introduced negative services. We must pay attention to these developments and implement adaptive management strategies to address emerging challenges. Combining ecological and cultural evolution research, this study provides a novel perspective on city evolution, thereby contributing to enhance city vitality and sustainability.