Vitality-Oriented Commercial Street Design Strategies: A Multi-Dimensional Quantitative Analysis of Chunxi Road, Chengdu, China

Research efforts to explain urban vitality encompass accessibility studies, place-based qualitative studies, morphological analysis, and land use studies. While several of these isolated approaches have yielded promising results, integrating these explanatory frameworks into a single model remains underexplored—and this constitutes the core goal of the present research. For the empirical study on the vitality of a commercial district, 13 explanatory factors were identified, with measured pedestrian flow (as a proxy for street vitality) serving as the dependent variable, examined in the Chunxi Road area of central Chengdu. To account for temporal variations in street vitality, pedestrian flow was measured across different times of the day and days of the week. Bivariate analysis and principal components analysis were employed to develop a multivariate regression model, which was further refined into a predictive algorithm tool to quantify the relative contributions of the explanatory factors. The results indicate that accessibility and street image factors each independently explain a large proportion of the variance in pedestrian flow, while public transport topological distance exerts a negative effect. Notably, the combined model exhibits significantly stronger explanatory power than the individual contributions of various factors reported in existing literature. Beyond advancing theoretical understanding of urban vitality, the primary purpose of this study is to utilize street vitality (operationalized via pedestrian flow) as an optimization indicator for commercial street planning and design schemes. The developed predictive algorithm model serves as a practical tool for designers, providing actionable references during the design formulation process, enabling them to assess potential street vitality based on preliminary design parameters and make evidence-based adjustments to enhance the effectiveness of commercial street designs. Additionally, the study findings offer insights for the management of urban commercial areas to further promote urban vitality.