Measuring Intra-Urban Innovation Space from the Unit-Network Perspective: A Case Study of Guangzhou

Three spatial turns have occurred in innovation research, including focuses on regional, urban, and intra-urban scales. The primary focus of this study was to determine the spatial distribution of innovation and the innovation networks within urban areas based on a unit-network analytical framework. ArcGIS Pro was applied to identify innovation space units and to build a collaboration matrix among these units. Subsequently, Gephi 0.9.2 was used to analyse the networks. Guangzhou was used as a case study for empirical analysis, and the main conclusions are as follows. Guangzhou contains 53 innovation space units covering 495 grids and an area of 123.75 km2 (1.67% of the land area). The 53 innovation space units encompass 231,698 patents, accounting for 72.28% of the total patents in Guangzhou. The 53 innovation space units can be categorised into three levels-innovation agglomeration zones (IAZs), innovation agglomeration sub-zones (IASZs), and innovation agglomeration nodes (IANs)-which can be further classified into nine types. The spatial distribution of innovation and the innovation networks in Guangzhou form a core-periphery structure, with the Wushan-Shipai Science and Education Innovation Zone, Tianhe Centre-Yuexiu East CBD Zone, and Guangzhou Science Town Innovation Zone forming three poles at the core. The weighted degree centrality of the three poles ranked among the top 3 of the 53 innovation space units, and the link frequency between poles was among the top 3 in the 143 pairs of connections between the 53 innovation spatial units.