Abstract:

With the acceleration of industrialization and urbanization, there is a phenomenon of hollowing villages resulting from the vacancy and idleness of rural housing in the core of villages in the vast rural areas of China. It is a unique spatial morphology of China's rural settlements shaped by a "dual track" structure of rural-urban socio-economic development. The formation and evolution of hollowing villages is closely interrelated with the spatial organization of the activities of the rural population and the migration flows between town and country and between rural areas. Based on the characteristics of rural housing land-use, an evolutive model of the development stages of hollowing villages was constructed. Usually, there are four evolutive stages in a normal development process of hollowing villages at the urban-rural fringe, i.e., solidization, subhollowing, hollowing and resolidization, which corresponds with the temporal characteristics of China's socio-economic development. However, China has a vast territory with obvious regional differentiation in the level of socio-economic development, which contributes to coexisting different evolutive stages of hollowing villages in the same period, in provincial even larger scale. The influencing factors of hollowing village formation and evolution include four aspects such as economic factors concerning economic growth and technological level, socio-cultural factors embracing population change, social and land-use main body behaviors, institutional and managerial factors including land property right, price and policy, and bio-physical factors. Accordingly, the evolutive types of hollowing villages were classified, and using high-resolution remote sensing data and household investigations, the evolutive characteristics and its driving mechanism of the evolution of hollowing village types in plain agricultural region were studied.

Key words: hollowing village, evolutive stage, evolutive type, driving mechanism, China