Spatial Pattern Variation And Influencing Factors Of Urban Consumer Service Space In The Post-Epidemic Era

Increasingly developing information technology is subtly changing the residents’ daily life.Under the emerging background of the industry digital transformation in the postepidemic era,the urban consumer services have been expanded in multiple formats,and the residents’ life has been expanded in multiple dimensions,which has given rise to residents’ increasingly diverse living needs.As a key place to ensure residents’ basic food needs and provide life services,the food market carries traditional market culture and fresh daily life.It is not only a typical representative of urban consumer service space,but also the forefront of the COVID-19 outbreak in China,which has been significantly affected by the epidemic and showed new vitality after the epidemic.Exploring the changes of the food market space in the post-epidemic era can not only guarantee the healthy and diversified development of the market itself,but also provide some references for the recovery of other consumer service fields and the optimization of consumer service space.Under this background,this study referred to the "three-level" food market system proposed in the document "Spatial Layout Planning of Standardized Food Markets in Wuhan City(2014-2020)",that is,"building a three-tiered food market system centered on the fresh department of hypermarkets,standardized vegetable markets,and community vegetable shops." Then,the study focused on four kinds of modern food markets:farmers’market,fresh supermarket,fresh department of hypermarket and community vegetable shops.This study regarded the urban food market as a representative place of consumer service space,and selected Wuhan,an important place where the COVID-19 was severe,as the main research area.The period from 2005 to 2021 was selected as the main research period.Specially,the period from 2005 to 2020 was used as the basic period for observing the city’s development before the epidemic,and the period from when Wuhan was unblocked in April 2020 to the present was used as the direct observation period for post-epidemic changes.Based on the perspective of geography and multi-disciplinary theories,combined with macro and micro scales,this study discussed the spatial pattern and characteristics,spatial functions and changes of Wuhan urban consumer services in the post-epidemic era,and analyzed the various motivations affecting spatial changes.Firstly,this study used POI data from Baidu map and ArcGIS software to analyze the spatio-temporal evolution of the consumer services in Wuhan,and initially revealed the trend of urban consumer service space transition to the post-epidemic phase.Secondly,based on the comment data of Dianping.com,this paper used ROST software to analyze the word frequency,sentiment and semantic network analysis of the consumers’ comments in the food market,interpreted the perception and identity of residents,and revealed the change performance of consumer service space in the post-epidemic phase.Finally,on the basis of the previous analysis,this study constructed a model to make econometric regression analysis to interpret how multiple motivations interweave and affect the changes in urban consumer service space.The results showed that:(1)Macro scale level.The food markets in Wuhan had experienced a development process of ensuring people’s livelihood-expanding consumption-returning to daily life.They had formed a new compound consumer service space with the fresh department of hypermarket,farmers’ market,fresh supermarket,and community vegetable shop,and this space system showed a certain resilience after the epidemic.Besides,the spatial structure of the food markets changed from dual-core to multi-core,and the spatial distribution extended from the city center to the periphery.The spatial layout of different types of food markets presented the differentiated distribution pattern of cluster-shaped(farmers’ market),strip-shaped(fresh supermarket),punctiformshaped(hypermarket),and cross-shaped(community vegetable shop).(2)Micro-scale level.Consumers’ perception of the food market was mainly constructed from four dimensions:food,variety,service and distance,and their emotional attitude was generally expressed as positive emotion.In the post-epidemic era,consumers’ perception tended to be more multi-dimensional and their emotional attitude was also more positive.As a result,the COVID-19 has affected consumers’ perceptions and emotions,and reconstructed the spatial identity of the urban food market in the post-epidemic era.Consumers were less sensitive to the authenticity of the traditional farmers’ market,and had a preference for the leisure and sociality of new retail spaces such as fresh supermarket and hypermarket,and were more concerned about the "word of mouth" of small-scale community-level food markets.(3)Influencing factors.All formats food market layout was influenced by social factors,economic factors,locational factors and development foundation,the traditional food market layout was affected by market factors and locational factors,and new retail format layout was affected by economic factors and preliminary basis of similar forms(shopping mall).Besides,the remodeling of consumption view by COVID-19 has strengthened the linkage between consumer service space and commercial complex,and newly built food markets preferred experiential consumption places represented by shopping malls when selecting locations.