Abstract
The development of the social landscape of towns and villages at the county level in China currently lacks sustainability and urgently needs to be optimized. By developing a compound ecological capital system, the optimization of the social landscape will be an important process. Based on the dialectical relationship between landscape production and landscape sustainability, a theoretical framework is proposed as a paradigm of landscape structure. By highlighting the culture base and life proposed in ecosystem services (ES) described in the common international classification of ecosystem services (CICES) methodology, we propose a new social landscape order. We used Hequ County, Shanxi Province, China as the study case, evaluating the ecology level of social capital by gravity. In this paper, four types of optimization approaches for social landscape structure are proposed: completing urbanization (urbanized approach), shaping social landscape (prioritized development approach), protecting nature (scale-controlled approach), and increasing agricultural landscape (migrated and merged approach).
Highlights
For towns and villages, landscape or capital usually refers to physical space
Sustainable livelihoods represent the pursuit of certain goals, prohibiting failure, while compound ecological capital takes the possibility of rural development based on its capital condition, and the possibility of development is forecast via capital evaluation
We propose that physical social capital (PHSC) can be the foundation of compound ecological capital
Summary
The collection of landscape resources constitutes the compound capital of towns and villages, including natural capital, economic capital, and social capital. In the urban–rural dual system, rural social structure was seriously separated, and numerous social ecological problems have recently emerged in various ways This is because, with the natural environmental pollution and natural resources shortage in rural areas, capitalists could not carry the reproduction of space, so they withdrew. Rural infrastructure and living environment took a turn for the worse, and the permanent population lost a lot, causing rural traditional culture to break and the social landscape to decline (Figure 1) All these deteriorating landscapes demonstrate that social structure in rural areas is extremely distorted in terms of economic development, and a comprehensive development model needs to be constructed urgently—the compound ecological capital in towns and villages. According to the differences in the ecological attributes possessed in different towns and villages, we propose the approaches for optimizing the social landscape
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
