{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,2,13]],"date-time":"2026-02-13T09:07:13Z","timestamp":1770973633359,"version":"3.50.1"},"reference-count":41,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"5","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2019,5,2]],"date-time":"2019-05-02T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1556755200000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"funder":[{"DOI":"10.13039\/501100002858","name":"China Postdoctoral Science Foundation","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["No. 2016M600609"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["No. 2016M600609"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/501100002858","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]},{"DOI":"10.13039\/501100002858","name":"China Postdoctoral Science Foundation","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["2016M602357"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["2016M602357"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/501100002858","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]},{"name":"National Science Fund for Young Scholars","award":["51708425"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["51708425"]}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Entropy"],"abstract":"<jats:p>The natural city, which is essential to understand urban physical scale and identify urban sprawling in urban studies, represents the urban functional boundaries of the city defined by human activities rather than the administrative boundaries. Most studies tend to utilize physical environment data such as street networks and remote sensing data to delimitate the natural city, however, such data may not match the real distribution of human activity density in the new cities or even ghost cities in China. This paper suggests aggregating the natural city boundary from the service area polygons of points of interest based on Reilly\u2019s Law of Retail Gravitation and the maximum entropy method, since most points of interests provide services for surrounding communities, reflecting the vitality in a bottom-up way. The results indicate that the natural city defined by points of interests shows a high resolution and accuracy, providing a method to define the natural city with POIs.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/e21050458","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2019,5,2]],"date-time":"2019-05-02T03:15:22Z","timestamp":1556766922000},"page":"458","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":16,"title":["Delimitating the Natural City with Points of Interests Based on Service Area and Maximum Entropy Method"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"21","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-9876-8506","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Lingbo","family":"Liu","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Urban Planning, School of Urban Design, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Binxin","family":"Xia","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Urban Planning, School of Urban Design, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-7107-8081","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Hao","family":"Wu","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Graphics and Digital Technology, School of Urban Design, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Jie","family":"Zhao","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Urban Planning, School of Urban Design, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Zhenghong","family":"Peng","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Graphics and Digital Technology, School of Urban Design, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-8776-0157","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Yang","family":"Yu","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Urban Planning, School of Urban Design, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2019,5,2]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"189","DOI":"10.1016\/j.compenvurbsys.2008.08.005","article-title":"Evolving rank-size distributions of intra-metropolitan urban clusters in South China","volume":"33","author":"Fragkias","year":"2009","journal-title":"Comput. 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