Multi-Dimensional Urban Waterfront Landscape Attributes and Recreational Vitality: Correlations and Strategies Based on the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal

Recreational vitality is widely recognized as a core metric for assessing the quality of human settlements. Elucidating the relationship between recreational vitality and landscape characteristics is crucial for guiding the optimization and quality enhancement of urban waterfront spaces. This study takes the micro-scale waterfront space of the Beijing–Hangzhou Grand Canal (Hangzhou section) as its research object, systematically analyzes the correlation between waterfront landscape attributes and recreational vitality, and formulates specific optimization strategies for enhancing recreational vitality. A total of 310 representative sampling sites was established. The study integrates machine learning-driven semantic image segmentation to achieve refined quantification of waterfront landscape metrics and employs anonymized mobile phone signaling data to dynamically characterize the spatiotemporal distribution of recreational vitality. Through correlation analysis and regression modeling, it quantifies the effect size and functional mechanisms of key landscape metrics on recreational vitality, and further proposes adaptive strategies for recreational vitality enhancement tailored to different urban functional zones. The key findings are as follows: (1) Recreational vitality is significantly higher on holidays than on workdays. High-vitality areas are concentrated in commercial functional zones, with an overall spatial gradient of “low in the east and high in the west, low in the north and high in the south”. (2) High-level Green View Factor (HGVF) shows a stable positive correlation with vitality, whereas the Sky View Factor (SVF) and the Enclosure Interface View Factor (EIVF) correlate negatively. (3) The influence of landscape metrics is strongly moderated by functional zone type: in residential functional zones, HGVF has strong explanatory power; in commercial functional zones, it shows complex nonlinearity; in ecological conservation zones, its explanatory power is generally weaker. (4) Tailored enhancement strategies are proposed for each functional zone. This study clarifies the link between core waterfront landscape attributes and micro-scale recreational vitality, and provides a scientific basis for evidence-based design and sustainable enhancement of urban waterfront spaces.