A Study On The Temporal And Spatial Characteristics Of The Cultural Landscape In The Villages Of Northwest

In current village-settlement research, there has been a lack of comparative research from perspectives of large scale and multi-ethnic-group in complicated geographical environment, based on this, this paper uses lens of cultural landscape to study village-settlement in northwestern Yunan Province. Main contents of this paper include basic concepts and component factors of village-settlement cultural landscape, its typical cases in various environment, as well as basic laws shown in spatial distribution and time course based on GIS entire sample analysis. The concept of village-settlement cultural landscape accentuates the balance relationship between natural environment and human power, and it may help counteract the weaknesses in cross-fields of village studies from geography, planning, architecture and humanities, in the mean-time it also has significance in philosophical thinking dimension.This research is targeted on natural villages, with a research area including Dali, Lijiang, Diqing, Nujiang four prefectures in northwestern Yunnan, according to natural geographical boarders, and it divides the research area into Dulong River, Nujiang River, Lancang River, Jinsha River and Yuanjiang River five basins, based on solid anthropological field studies, taking 3.5 years to cover more than one hundred villages across five valleys, with 26 villages in-depth studied, and it has completed dozens of survey interviews and 11 architectural surveys. This paper is built on abundantly- acquired data, adopting interdisciplinary research approaches including urban and rural planning, architecture and anthropology, and makes spatial information technology as the technical support for multi-disciplinary research.Guided by research ideas of “targeted on village-settlement, bordered with administrative boundaries, focusing on valleys and supplemented with ethnic groups”, starting from the concept of village-settlement cultural landscape, and using the approach of “lived with industries, housed in settlements, and thought with religions”, and this paper conducts a large-scale synchronous comparison among village-settlements’ features including geographical environment, major industries, physical space & residential buildings and religions, combining case studies focused on typicality with macro research method based on GIS entire samples, systematically discussing the spatial distribution of village-settlement cultural landscape in “synchronic state”, and its evolution laws in “chronic state.”This paper concludes that: Village-settlement cultural landscape in northwestern Yunnan was double influenced by Tibetan-Yi-Corridor and Chinese-Han-Corridor, significantly correlated in its spatial distribution and characteristics of basins, in the mean-time with prominent differentiation. Industry is one of the most representing categories for “human-nature” relationship; settlement is the concentrated expression of “human-human” relationship; and the latter’s generation is constrained by industries and is also influenced by cultural exchange and ethnic characteristics; religion is a reality projection of “human-god” relationship, exerting influences in village-settlement’s space on various scales. The spatial distribution of industry, settlement and religion shows a principle of gradual change which has an overall correspondence but with slight variances in parts. As far as the characteristics of time concerned, the “human-nature relationship” based on constraints and selection forms the evolution mechanism of village-settlement cultural landscape, and this course can be generalized as a balance and regression model.