Abstract
Traditional villages along rivers have contributed significantly to local–regional development by transporting production and spreading culture through certain routes. To date, the cultural continuity of traditional villages has been underestimated in sustainable development with regard to practical dilemmas between conservation and development. This study explores an integrated approach to traditional villages in river basins that considers historic relics, locality, and spatial form. The cultural routes concept is introduced from the field of cultural heritage to link geographically scattered villages that shared the same cultural values and purposes in the past and to stimulate their potential as dynamic routes for further rural revitalization. In this context, the following subtopics are defined for a specific analysis of the lower Chishui River in Guizhou: an evolving framework of cultural routes and the spatial-temporal route of “Sichuan salt into Guizhou”, including its contemporary transformation. The findings of cultural and spatial coherence in historical texts, maps, morphological structures, and rural landscapes support a multi-cultural route model for sustainable development. The study extends the prevailing knowledge on cultural sustainability in rural revitalization and it provides novel insights into spatial development in basin environments.
Highlights
Human–river relations have brought mobility to the relatively fixed human–land relations in past agricultural societies, conferring diversity and local identity in terms of culture and human habitat
This suggests that the urban methodology and design paradigm derived from modernism have not been directly applied to rural revitalizations in spite of certain human–land relationships [4]
The purpose of this paper is to adopt a dynamic perspective on cultural routes for the conservation and the development of traditional settlements on the basis of the locality
Summary
Human–river relations have brought mobility to the relatively fixed human–land relations in past agricultural societies, conferring diversity and local identity in terms of culture and human habitat. In rural China, modern practices resulted in a universal phenomenon of the same image in different regions regardless of local characteristics or traditional merits This suggests that the urban methodology and design paradigm derived from modernism have not been directly applied to rural revitalizations in spite of certain human–land relationships [4]. The site selection of the traditional settlements in the Chishui River basin conforms to the dual requirements of topographical context and cultural transmission, with corresponding cultural content and vitality in different eras. It is through respect for the laws of nature that humans can achieve sustainable development under rational constraints [43]
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