15-Minute life Circles: Impact of Needs-Based urban facility configuration on Residents’ emotions

• Validates the effectiveness of needs-based urban facility configuration within 15-minute life circles in enhancing residents’ emotions, revealing heterogeneity across life circle types. • It confirms a marginal diminishing effect on emotional enhancement from facility configuration. • The marginal diminishing effect shows spatial heterogeneity among administrative districts. This study examines the impact of needs-based urban facility configurations within 15-minute life circles on the emotions of residents, as well as variations across multiple dimensions. By integrating Maslow’s hierarchy of needs theory with multisource big data, we employ the entropy weight-TOPSIS (E-TOPSIS) model, city hotspot detector (CHD) clustering, large language model-based sentiment analysis, and mixed linear models (MLM) to analyse the geotagged social media data from Guangzhou in 2023 and 2024. The results show that needs-based urban facility configurations within 15-minute life circles significantly improve residents’ emotions, with marked differences across life circle types (H1). The emotional enhancement effect exhibits an overall marginal diminishing trend, with heterogeneity across administrative districts (H2). This study demonstrates the importance of needs-based configurations for enhancing residents’ emotions, extends the returns of urban facility development to include both “psychological returns” and “economic returns,” and offers a new perspective for the co-development of residents and cities.