Analysis of urban visitor walkability based on mobile data: The case of Daejeon, Korea

The walkability of destinations plays a decisive role in obtaining a sense of place for urban visitors. For an improved walkability-based visit experience, the city structure can be analyzed by dividing it into small units, starting with the destination. However, existing studies focus on the walkability of residents by administrative district and use limited contextual information and structural analysis tools. Therefore, this study aims to structurally understand walkability through network analysis with mobile-based visitor data collected from 822 point-of-interest (POI) in Daejeon. In this study, the actual walking distance between 95,817 cells with visitors and POIs was measured to calculate the edge weight and influence of cells on POI. We analyzed the POI-cell network through edge weight and extracted nine communities to understand the city context through POI analysis and derived the following findings. First, it is possible to determine the potential demand by visitors' walkability-based division. Second, our walkability measurement method follows a bottom-up approach, starting with a small unit cell, understanding the entire city as a community extraction model, and possibly extending to other cities in Korea. Third, POI-centered structural analysis is possible using the number of visitors and distance in the proposed network analysis method.