Abstract: This paper proposed a method for determining the scope of daily lives of urban residents based on travel behaviors; with the purpose of exploring the heterogeneity of urban structure from perspective of behavior geography. It was assumed that there exists a certain scale, where the people of inside the scale with outside are very active, and it turns significantly inactive beyond the scale. This attribute helps to identify urban areas belonging to same units of urban life. Taking Qinghe Yongtai area in Beijing as an example; we made a survey on residents’travel frequencies to 24 label places in and surrounding the study area, which showed their familiarities with those places. Then, K-means clustering analysis was conducted with the travel frequency data and the spatial distribution data of the samples. By Voronoi transformation of sample clusters, the whole study area was divided into different parts and the spatial scope for the separation was obtained. Further analysis on the social and economic attributes of different parts reveals that, indices of second-hand housing prices, attributes of residential blocks including building ages, planning and management, and the coverage of same commercial and transportation facilities are key factors for identifying the boundaries of urban communities. This identifying method can make reference for scale choosing in fields of residential environmental evaluation and so on.

Key words: residents’travel behavior, scope of daily life, spatial cluster analysis, spatial scale