10. Urban Networks of Leisure Activities: Using Douban Event to Measure Interaction in the Megacity Region of the Pearl River Delta

For the academic topic of megacities, urban networks have become a key subject of studies of city regions in the recent decade. Scholars have examined various types of urban networks, including the corporation network, the traffic network, the infrastructure network and the scientific citation network. However, little attention has been paid to integrated networks of leisure activities in megacity regions. With the advance of information communication technology, leisure—an important function of cities—is now receiving growing attention in both the real world and in cyberspace. Douban Event is a sub-website of Douban where people can post information about their leisure activities and where others can express whether they are interested in those activities, leading to potential interactions between real and virtual links in city regions. Thus, this study examines the urban networks of leisure activities in the PRD by using cross-regional activities on Douban. By identifying users’ attention to events in cities in which they do not live, we produce an asymmetric matrix of flows in the PRD as the database of an urban network. Furthermore, we use certain statistic tools (the cluster coefficient, central degree and symmetry index) to examine the structure of the PRD network. The results suggest that networks of leisure activities in city regions represent a polycentric spatial structure, as Guangzhou and Shenzhen have become the hub cities in the PRD. As the two cities maintain complementary functional connectivity in the PRD, the connectivity of hub cities and secondary cities forms the basic framework of the urban network. Moreover, planning suggestions are proposed based on the empirical results. The hub cities, which also have large facilities, have become hot spots in this region in terms of both ornamental and interactive activities, while the advantages of medium-size cities are that their local resources attract many citizens by offering specialized facilities for interactive activities.