Restructuring rural settlements based on mutualism at a patch scale: A case study of Huangpi District, central China

摘要

Mutualism, as one of the main types of symbiosis, refers to the reciprocal relationship among rural settlements on the basis of material and information interactions and capitalizing on the environments where they are located in. The relationship among rural settlements has long been neglected in the process of rural settlement restructuring. To explore the possibility of integrating mutualism into rural settlement restructuring, an environmental index (El) was defined to comprehensively evaluate the exterior conditions of rural settlements at a patch level, and two hypotheses were proposed. The first hypothesis postulates that mutualism exists in aggregation area of rural settlement patches with high El values. The second one suggests that mutualism is present in areas where there are interactions among all the participant settlement patches. Hotspot analysis and component analysis were conducted respectively to obtain mutualistic areas based on the two hypotheses. In the case study of Huangpi, real mutualism was defined based on utilizing people flow data from questionnaire investigation in three towns, and crosstabs analysis and chi-square test were conducted between real mutualism and assumed mutualism developed from the two hypotheses. As results, the second hypothesis was verified. 26 mutualistic areas of Huangpi were identified, and 42 rural settlement patches with a total area of 12.51 ha were decided as relocation settlements. Considering the effects of urban land, serving areas of urban land were derived from accessibility analysis. Intersection of serving areas of urban land and mutualistic areas of rural settlement patches were set to be the prior restructuring direction within a town. Otherwise, two restructuring directions were suggested, including serving areas of urban land oriented and mutualism of rural settlement patches oriented directions. This study contributes to understanding the mutualism among rural settlement patches, and also offers a new perspective to rural settlement restructuring.