Restructuring Of Rural Settlements In Plain Region Driven By China Agricultural Modernization

Agricultural modernization has been driving the transformation of modern agricultural production modes and accelerating the embedding of modern production organization approaches into the agricultural system.It not only facilitates technology innovation and thus improve production efficiency in agriculture but also leads to the strengthening of rural social differentiation and heterogeneity.Thus,the rural settlement system,traditionally as an integrative combination of agricultural production,farmers’ living and rural ecology,will experience further socioeconomic differentiation and function reconfiguration.However,it has been a long time that there is little theoretical research on rural space development even though it is common to see the growing hollowness of rural social structure and the fragmentation of rural spatial structure resulting from increasing rural population loss and social transformation.Therefore,to study the spatial reconfiguration of rural settlements and the underlying mechanism driven by the development of agricultural modernization will singnificantly contribute to the establishment of complete theory on the spatial development of rural settlements and thus offer practical guiding lines from sustainable development of the rural areas.Based on existing research and through in-depth analysis of the evolution of rural settlement system,the factors of agricultural modernization related to rural settlement resctruturing and the operation mechanism,this research attempts to figure out the evolutionary principles of the rural settlements.By referring to cases of rural settlement transformations,it explores the general planning theory for the spatial reconstructing of rural settlements space in plain areas from systems view.It is expected that the outcome will help to guide the spatial reconstructing of rural settlements and promote the sustainable development of rural society in the context of agricultural modernization.First,from an extensive research perspectives of rural sociology,history,geography and other disciplines,and based on analysis of the formation mechanisms and factors contributing to the rural settlement system,this thesis explores this settlement system’s evolution process and spatial characteristics in the agricultural period and the early industrialization period in China.It is found that the spatial distribution of the rural settlements in small-scale peasant economy is dominated by a scattering pattern featured by being “largely scattered and partially concentrated”.And the major factors that contributing to this spatial pattern are the small-scale peasant economy mode,the family kinship,the rural culture inheritance and social upheavals.In the early stage of industrialization,although the agricultural production mode,social networks,and the fusion of urban and rural cultures had changed to some extent,the social relation network featured by family kinship had exerted its dominant influence upon the shaping of the identified spatial pattern described as being “largely scattered and partially concentrated”.Second,based on a variety of cases with spatio-temporal big data,questionnaire investigation and in-depth interviews,and by following the line of the development of agricultural modernization and treating the “rural settlement system as the projection of rural production space and living space”,this thesis analyzes the impacts of the development of agricultural modernization on the demand for rural labor force,the rural employment structure,the demand for rural public services and the rural social relations using the statistics application STATA 14.The conclusion is that the development of agricultural modernization influences the rural population flow between the urban and the rural areas and at the same time within the rural regions,which build up the preconditions for the spatial restructuring of rural settlements.By looking into the practical spatial restructuring of rural settlements in plain area in China and using landscape metrics adopted in landscape ecology,the spatial evolution characteristics of the rural settlements are then explained and the issues arising from this status quo are identified.In addition,by the approach of AHP using SPSS and ArcGIS,quantitatively this research analyzes the interactive relationship between the pattern of rural settlements and the influencing factors including modern agricultural economy mode,social relation networks,the household registration system and the housing property right system.And supported by data from engaged observation of agricultural production and farmers’ lives,it goes futher by exploring the operating mechanism in and proposing the a dynamic framework for the restructuring of the rural settlement system influenced and constrainted by the transformation of economic mode,the restructuring of social networks and the variation of policies and institutional structures.Finally,returing from the extensive perspectives of economics,sociology and geography to the spatial angle focused in urban and rural planning,this research summarizes the theoretical restructuring modes and the spatial distribution modes of the rural settlements in plain areas in China by referring to classic urban and rural planning theories.In light of these problems and by referring to the aforementioned theoretical modes of rural settlement restructuring,this research in the end puts forward the strategies for the spatial optimization of the rural settlements.