PROGRESS IN GEOGRAPHY ›› 2016, Vol. 35 ›› Issue (11): 1388-1396.doi: 10.18306/dlkxjz.2016.11.009

• Orginal Article • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Extracting spatial distribution patterns of the traditional villages based on geographical grid classification method

Liang YU(), Xiaoli MENG   

  1. Gold Mantis School of Architecture, Soochow University, Suzhou 215123, Jiangsu, China
  • Online:2016-11-25 Published:2016-11-25
  • Supported by:
    National Natural Science Foundation of China, No.41371173

Abstract:

Chinese traditional villages provide the environment where humans live in harmony with nature for thousands of years. They record traditional architectural, folk custom, and residential forms. With the accelerating process of urbanization, the very existence and sustainable development of traditional villages have faced great challenges. To facilitate better protection and utilization of traditional villages, it is particularly important to study them through multiple perspectives. In addition to specific protection measures at the micro-level, we should also strengthen the study of traditional village spatial distribution at the macro-level. Geographic grid is a basic method to express complex geographic phenomena, analyze natural and social data, and simulate the function and behavior of geographic systems. This study extracted the coordinates of villages from Baidu map and remote sensing images for the village location point data. Combined with geographic grid classification method, it analyzed the spatial distribution patterns of the three published batches of traditional villages (total 2555), and found that these villages are mainly distributed in southeastern China: 586 and 781 villages were found in the first-level grids 18 and 19, accounting for 96.6% of these traditional villages. By analyzing the discreteness of village distribution in the second-level and third-level grids, structure of the spatial distribution of these villages became clearer, and this provides the framework and foundation for constructing a traditional village database.

Key words: geographic grid, classification method, traditional village, spatial distribution, China