Portraying business district vibrancy with mobile phone data and optimal parameters-based geographical detector model

•Urban vibrancy at business district level was revealed.•Base station-level mobile phone data were used.•Both individual and interactive influences of factors were quantified.•Land area and industrial agglomeration effect were most critical factors.•Urban planning should fully consider the interaction of multiple factors. Since Jane Jacob proposed the concept of urban vibrancy in 1961, it has been a research focus in multi-disciplines. This study portrays the business district vibrancy from the perspectives of measurement, spatial patterns, and influencing factors in Guangzhou, China with mobile phone data and the optimal parameters-based geographical detector (OPGD) model. The results reveal that distance decay was observed in the spatial distribution of business district vibrancy. The model for the interactive influence of factors has greater explanatory power than the model for the individual influence of each factor. Except for the distance from the city center, other factors including the number of neighbors, metro accessibility, POI density, area, road density, floor area ratio, and land use mixture were positively correlated with business district vibrancy. Among factors, the land area and the number of neighbors were the two most critical factors jointly explaining 97.3% of the variance of the spatial distribution of business district vibrancy. It emphasizes that the land area and industrial agglomeration effect are the most important aspect of business districts. Finally, this study suggests that urban planners should fully consider the interaction of multiple factors when developing plans to cultivate the vibrancy of business districts. [Display omitted]