Abstract:

Urban population during the daytime and at night and their spatial distribution are important bases for planning urban infrastructure, public services and disaster relief. As current population statistics cannot distinguish urban population during the daytime from that at night, existed research in this field are quite limited. This paper tries to advance studies at this aspect by establishing a relationship model for the three components of ‘population, land use and time (daytime or night)’ to explore the temporal and spatial characteristics of different types of population, which is aimed to estimate urban population during the daytime and at night and to analyze their spatial characteristics at grid scale. Furthermore, an empirical case study has been carried out at the Haidian District in Beijing, China to test the model. The results are as follows: (1) The spatial structure of urban population during the daytime is significantly different from that at night. The spatial distribution of urban population during the daytime is more extensive and more agglomerated that that at night. (2) Several types of spatial coupling relationship between population during the daytime and that at night have been identified, such as sandwich mode, symmetry mode, convergence mode and single mode, etc. (3) The spatial distribution of daytime and nighttime population also reflects certain factors during the development of China, such as the distribution of old residential areas, the construction of new industrial districts, and the differences between urban and rural areas, which can provide reference points for studies in this field and other regional research.

Key words: urban population during the daytime and at night, spatial patterns, spatial coupling types, Beijing