Geographic space is not neutral or lifeless, but an intricate living structure composed of numerous small features and a few large ones across all scales. The living structure is crucial for comprehending how geographic space shapes human activities. With the emerging geospatial big data, researchers now have unprecedented opportunities to study the relationship between geographic space and human behaviour at a finer spatial resolution. This thesis leverages multisource geospatial big data, including Twitter check-in locations, street networks from OpenStreetMap, building footprints, and night-time light images, to explore the fundamental mechanisms of human activities that underlie geographic space. To overcome the limitations of conventional analytics in this era of big data, we propose the topological representation and living structure based on Christopher Alexander's conception of space.

We utilize scaling and topological analyses to reveal the underlying living structure of geographic space with various big datasets. Our results demonstrate that tweet locations or human activities at different scales can be accurately predicted by the underlying living structure of street nodes. We also capture and characterize human activities using big data and find that building footprints and tweets show similar scaling patterns in terms of sizes of their spatial clusters. We also propose an improved spatial clustering method to increase the processing speed of geospatial big data. Finally, we adopt topological representation to identify urban centres by the fusion of multi-source geospatial big data. The living structure, together with its topological representation can help us better understand human activities patterns in the geographic space at both city and country levels.