Accessibility and Population Density in the Linpan Landscape: A Study of Urbanization in the Chengdu Plain, Sichuan, China

Abstract

Rural area in China is rapidly changing and developing under the New Socialist Countryside policy. To take a careful study on village construction is very important for the future planning of China’s modernization. The accessibility and commuting behaviors of rural areas to a higher level of communities play an important function on the social and economic development. The influence of higher level communities to villages concerns the future redevelopment model and the industrial structure of local villages, as well as the lifestyle of local villagers. The linpan landscape is a wonderful case study because Chengdu has a relatively high population density with the scattered linpan landscape. Lots of local planners was seeking for a redevelopment planning model which can increase the accessibility of villages to outside without density increase quickly, as well as to protect the valuable linpan traditional landscape. There is a contradiction between high intensity neighborhood and the traditional high density population and scattered linpan landscape. The case studies were four different development model of villages in Pi County. I used three factors, commuting features, population density and accessibility to test the four different development model in linpan landscape. Through the data analysis and evaluation, I got the results that the commuting behaviors in linpan landscape are different based on different patterns of four villages and the transportation network does not determine the accessibility and the new concentration model does not make the transit easier. Accessibility plays an important role of villages’ industrial structure and lifestyles of local people. In comparing alternatives, the accessibility of Zhanqi village is better than other three but it deviated the most from the linpan structure.