Research On Rural Tourism Community Evolution In Spatial Perspective

In the background of fast urbanization, idyllic scenery and country culture are increasingly becoming scarce resources. Rural community, with convenient traffic and the beautiful scenery, becomes an important leisure destination for urban residents. Rural tourism hence arises and develops rapidly. In the fast developing process of rural tourism community, it’s important to explore the evolving process and mechanism of rural tourism community for promoting sustainable development.Traditionally, research on evolution of rural tourism community is often limited in evolution of landscape style. In this view, social factors and institutional factors are regarded as incentives affecting landscape style of rural tourism community. On the contrary, evolving process and mechanism of social factors and institutional factors are often ignored. In spatial perspective of postmodern geography, this paper, taking village Q and village Y as examples, divides rural tourism community space into three dimensions, which are landscape space, social space and institutional space, and researches on the evolving process, evolving mechanism and mutually evolving mechanism of the three dimensions. Through the research, we found that the evolution of landscape space, social space and institutional space are specialized by path dependence. The three dimensions interact, and share common features and processes. Innovation of space is the main motivation of rural tourism community evolution. The details are as follows:Firstly, the evolution of rural tourism community landscape space is a path-dependent process affected by industry evolution mechanism. In the perspective of evolving economic geography theory, the evolution of rural tourism community landscape space can be divided into stages of ex-form, form, growth and stereotype (or innovation), and is specialized with path dependence. Affected by inheritance, variation, and selection mechanism, industry evolution mechanism plays a great role in the evolution of rural tourism community landscape space.Secondly, the evolution of rural tourism community social space is a path-dependent process affected by synergy of authority, elites and ordinary villagers. The interactive mechanism of authority, elites and ordinary villagers in rural tourism community social space can be summarized as follows:In the first place, the impacts of authority and of elites are inversely proportional. In the second place, the cooperation of elites and the integration degree of rural tourism community social space are directly proportional. In the third place, the integration degree of rural tourism community social space and the balance of income distribution to villagers are directly proportional. Finally, the higher rural tourism community social space integrates, the better it evolves.Thirdly, the evolution of rural tourism community institutional space is a path-dependent process affected by the game of all-level institutional stakeholders. The game system of all-level institutional stakeholders can be summarized as follows:In the first place, policies about the rural tourism development depend on the interaction, competition and compromise of relevant departments’goals and interest. Polices are the result of game among all relevant departments. In the second place, when executing rural tourism policies of central government departments, local government weighs the costs and rewards of all the policies. In the third place, the execution of "nongjiale" management system depends on the game of all stakeholders in the rural tourism community. The positive feedback of executing polices will make institutional space evolve well, and vice versa.Finally, the evolution of landscape space, social space and institutional space interact and mutually evolve. The mutually evolving system of rural tourism community space can be divided into four parts, that is, multi-level embedded scenery, initial conditions, co-evolving mechanism and evolution. Multi-level embedded scenery includes local embedded and regional embedded. Co-evolution mechanism includes study mechanism, interaction mechanism, innovation mechanism and selection mechanism. The cases of village Q and village Y show that, each mechanism plays different roles in different periods of rural tourism community space evolution. Space innovation is the main motivation of rural tourism community space evolution, and could drive rural tourism community into prosperity.