Research On Spatial Changes Of A Featured Town—Gasa In Recent Ten Years And Its Influencing Factors

Taking an example of Gasa,a small characteristic town in Xinping County, Yuxi City, Yunnan Province, this paper aims to discuss the success and failure in planning and construction of such a key town in western area under the background of new-type urbanization and explore the sustainable development way for characteristic small towns in Yunnan province.As a key small town of Yunnan Province, Gasa Town enjoys significant regional and transportation advantages. Gasa Town has unique and precious resource endowment. Natural resources of Ailaoshan Mountain combined with unique Huayao Dai ethnic cultural resources as well as abundant mineral resources have laid a favorable foundation for industrial and tourism development. In recent ten years, the small town was developed in an unprecedented way. Great achievements have been fulfilled in urban construction and significant changes have taken place in general urban spatial form and urban landscape environment. This paper will analyze and study the urban spatial variation of Gasa town, make overall analysis on the general spatial form of Gasa town in terms of regional transportation, natural influencing factor, planning guidance and policy background from a macroscopic perspective and summarize the change features of urban space development; Besides, it will analyze the variation in urban street space, square space, architectural scene and greenery landscape from a meso perspective. It also points out that some local sections of the town were developed too hurry, fast and extensive, resulting in the damage to the former cozy landscape environment of the small town and much to be regretted. Partial building indicates excessive form pursuit, bringing about surplus variation and insufficient unity to the overall scene of the town and causing alienation and degeneration in previous refreshing and simple small town landscape.For these problems, this paper explore the influences of urban planning in urban development and the roles played by economic, social, policy and capital factors in urban construction in a discriminative way. Also, with consideration of the new-type urbanization development in Yunnan, it will further discuss how to make innovations in small town planning and governance and guarantee the high-level construction results and put forward the development outlook of characteristic Gasa town in the future. The research outputs of this paper might be used as urban planning and construction reference by similar small towns with natural and ethnic culture resources in western area of our country under the context of new-type urbanization.