Vegetation phenology is a comprehensive indicator of climate and natural environment changes and is an important parameter of plant growth and climate change. With the development of the economy and society, nightlight has the characteristics of indicating human activity information and light intensity, making it a hot spot in studying urban ecosystems and ecological construction. Based on this, we used the geodetector method and variable importance in the projection index to explore the influence of temperature, precipitation, radiation, and nightlight on vegetation phenology on the temporal and spatial aspects from 2001-2020 in Shanghai. Furthermore, we analyzed the contribution of the nightlight and environmental factors to phenology by comparing the difference between urban and suburban areas. The results showed that the temperature in urban Shanghai was about 0.63℃ higher than that of the suburbs, the start growth of season (SOS) of urban was advanced 10 days more than the suburbs, the end growth of season (EOS) was delayed 7 days more than suburbs, and nightlight in urban was 2.9 times more than suburbs during 2001-2020. On the spatial scale, nightlight has the greatest impact on urban SOS (q=0.15), and the combined driving of nightlight and radiation also has the greatest impact on vegetation phenology (q_max=0.29) in both urban and suburbs of Shanghai than other interacting factors. On the temporal scale, the SOS has the closest relationship with temperature and advanced with the increasing temperature (R_temperature=-0.24), while the EOS has the closest relationship with nightlight and was delayed with increasing nightlight (R_nightlight=0.28). By comprehensively comparing the influence strength of the phenological driving factors and multiple-factor control mechanism of vegetation phenology, the dominant influence factor of SOS was radiation (41.40% of total area) and the dominant influence factor of suburban SOS and urban/suburban EOS was nightlight. Thus, the various responses of vegetation phenology to human activities and climate change were closely related to the influence relationship and the temporal and spatial strength. This study could provide new ideas in exploring the influence of human activities on vegetation phenology, and provide a theoretical basis for cities to cope with climate change and improve the ecological environment.