Mesoscale Structure in Urban–Rural Mobility Networks in the Pearl River Delta Area: A Weighted Stochastic Block Modeling Analysis

Understanding the spatial structure of a megaregion with urban and rural areas is crucial for promoting sustainable urbanization urban–rural integration. Compared to city network (or areas), however, fewer studies focus on connecting or comparison regional structures between networks. Using weighted daily mobility flows from massive mobile-phone signaling data, this study constructs an urban–urban (UUM) (URM) in Pearl River Delta (PRD) region. A stochastic block model (WSBM) was adopted identify compare latent mesoscale two Results investigated gradient community nested typical core–periphery (CP) UUM asymmetric bipartite mixed CP hierarchies URM network. In different configuration urban/rural nodes groupings their roles, positions, linkages, yielded empirical insights renewed interaction potential planning pathways towards