Research On Rural Settlement Development And Spatial Structure In Loess Hilly Area

Settlement geography is the important research content of Human Geography, which is an important cut-in point of studying man-land Relationship. But since the Second World War, with each country's city construction and restoration and rapid development of city economy, the international geographical community turns around the barycenter to the city and the study of rural settlement geography is constantly decreasing. In China, with the implement of urbanization strategy and fast development of city, city is the focus of research objects for Chinese geography and planning communications and the research on rural settlement lagged far behind. Rural settlement is the place of habitation, production and the living for rural people, which is the settlements of rural regional horizon and whose formation and development evolution were effected profoundly by nature condition and factors of rural society, economy and culture. The area of our country's rural region is large with the numerous population and huge rural settlements. For a long time, there were sharp contradictions and problems in the developing process of rural settlement such as the coexistence of rural habitat empty-disusing and land occupation for building, the out-of-order development of villages and towns, the dispersed layout of village distribution, the poor rural basic constructions and the lack of Public Services and so on.The study area Qinan County is situated in the west of the Longzhong Loess Plateau, which is located in the southeast of Gansu Province, in the north of Tianshui City and at the Lower Reaches of Hulu River Basin as the branch of Wei River. The county belongs to Loess Hilly gully Area, where has widespread loess distribution, more mountains and fewer plains, the Liang and Mao fluctuation, dense gully valley and terrain broken. Qin'an County is also one of the regions that have been exploited early in our country, and its agricultural development has extremely glorious history. But along with the unceasing growth of population, the man-land relationship worsens day by day. Under the driving of population and survival pressure, the village settlement unceasingly proliferated over space that has formed extremely dispersible spatial distribution pattern.This paper took the development of village settlement and its spatial structure as the research content and used the methods such as combining theory analysis with empirical research, the combination of qualitative analysis and quantitative model, the combination of document and the social investigation and means of GIS technique from the multiple perspectives of geography, economy, society, history, culture and so on. In the article, Qin'an County territory village settlement and its the spatial structure development evolution in the downstream of Hulu River Basin were analyzed systematically and studied synthetically and their explanation frames were constructed from different spatial stratification. Besides, the basic rule of village settlement development evolution was discussed and analyzed. In the aspect of research on origin and the development of village settlement, the paper summarized its general historical path. According to the historical literature and the archaeological data, the generalized analysis and the research were carried on for the origin and the development of village settlement in Qin'an County territory of the Hulu River basin in the historical period; Using the statistical data, the image material and field investigations, the county territory village settlement development and its spatial structure were researched after New China Founded. Besides, the theory supposition and the analysis were carried on to the village settlement fission evolution. In the aspect of research on village settlement region - shape spatial structure, the rural settlement region spatial structure of study area was researched, from the two aspects of village settlement system and the village settlement community through using methods such as Fractal Theory, fragment index, evenness index, the closest adjoint point index and so on; Using settlement mottling shape index and GIS, the settlement shape spatial structure was studied from the aspects of settlement spatial structure, the spatial structure type, the spatial structure pattern, "the village territory" spatial structure and "the village" interior spatial structure, and the village settlement spatial expansion characteristic and rural habitat empty-disusing were discussed. In the aspects of research on settlement social spatial structure, based on the widespread investigation, the paper analyzed the type and the characteristic of settlement social life space of study area from the research angle of social vicissitude, the social fact and daily life and discussed the relations between the social space and the shape space of village settlement.The development of modern village was effected intensely by the national policy and the plan, and the village space development policy as well as the related plan theory directly affects the construction and the development in rural area. Both the villages and small towns plan that developed widely and the regional planning involve the realistic questions as the system vicissitude between village and space, the mutual function of city and countryside, the village construction and so on. But in the concrete practice, the people often use the simple space gathering pattern to solve present problems as diverse and complicated village gathering and rural space development. According to the thorough analysis on the driving mechanism of village settlement spatial structure evolution and based on the idea of "the region whole development" and " innovating city and countryside region space, promoting the village settlement moderate centralizing", the paper analyzed the problems such as space network development of the city and countryside in the region, the rural industrialization and urbanization and the building thought of our country's traditional settlements, and presents practical ways and countermeasure which can promote the village settlement development and its the spatial structure optimization.