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A quantitative study of urban vitality brings new insights for evaluating the external construction environment and internal development power of cities. However, it still has limited knowledge of the relations between people’s diverse urban life and urban vitality, although urban activities are often used as the proxy for urban vitality. This paper aims to deeply mine the content of urban social life and reveal the driving mechanism of urban vitality after inspecting human activities. We propose a general framework for exploring the spatial pattern and driving mechanism of urban vitality using multi-source big data. It builds a mapping relationship between various urban activities and urban vitality aspects, including economic and social. In addition, the physical environment (static) and human–land interaction (dynamic) indicators are designed to analyze the driving mechanism of urban vitality using the Geographically Weighted Regression model. The results show that the spatial pattern and driving factors of urban vitality are heterogeneous over space regarding both the economic and social aspects of our experimental study. This work provides us with multiple perspectives to understand the connotation of urban vitality and urges us to develop rational strategies to make the city more vital, coordinated, and sustainable.

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With the accelerating urbanization in developing countries, sustainable urban development has become a strategic goal for governments. To promote sustainable development of individual cities, it is necessary to break away from the limitations of administrative divisions and use the synergistic effect of urban clusters to solve the many difficulties facing sustainable development. The assessment of economic vitality is a critical way to evaluate the development potential of cities. This paper proposes a quantitative assessment method for urban economic vitality. Using 26 cities in the Yangtze River Delta region as the research object and local statistical yearbooks as the data source, we construct 18 urban economic vitality assessment indicators. First, we use the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) method to obtain the five major factors of city vitality assessment: manufacturing and people’s life factor, service industry and government management factor, industrial economic growth rate factor, urban development potential factor and primary and secondary industry efficiency factor. Then, we use spatial hotspot analysis to classify the urban economic vitality of the Yangtze River Delta region into three categories: low, medium and high. The research results have important implications for the coordinated and sustainable development of the regional economy and the formulation of economic development strategies for low-vitality regions.