Abstract:

As important carriers of Chinese civilization, traditional villages are endowed with rich and diversified values. Although the government and academia have implemented lots of programmes on protections and researches, the sustainable development still has a long way to go. Therefore, it is of profound significance to establish an evaluation system for the sustainable development of Chinese traditional villages and to evaluate the sustainable development level of Chinese traditional villages. Through long-term field survey of traditional villages, this study proposes that understanding the two basic attributes of community and heritage is the key to cognizing the sustainable development of traditional villages. Then it uses the analytic hierarchy process and Delphi method to construct the index system of community development subsystem and heritage protection subsystem, and applies an expert judgment matrix and the Delphi method to determine the index weights of the subsystems at all levels, and constructs the systems of data collection, assignment, and standardization for each secondary index. The comprehensive evaluation index is used to evaluate the development level of traditional villages, and determine the criteria for ranking. In order to better evaluate the sustainable development level of traditional Chinese villages, a coupling coordination model is further introduced to construct an evaluation system. Finally, through the evaluation of 10 traditional Lingnan villages in Guangzhou, Foshan and Zhongshan cities of Guangdong province, the validity of the index system is verified and further revised. This index system can not only promote the research paradigm of traditional villages, coupling degree and sustainable development assessment, but also widely guide and apply to the protection practices of traditional villages in China.

Key words: Chinese traditional villages, sustainable development, evaluation system, degree of coupling coordination, empirical test