Characteristic Analysis of the Village and Town Structure -A Case of Jinhu County in Jiangsu Province, China

This thesis gives overview of the connotation of rural spatial structure, indicating 4 kinds of elements, namely nodus, passage, region and flow. Their spatial arrangement and interaction lead to the corresponding rural spatial structure. This thesis also offers panorama of the related theoretical progress of intra-county and rural areas, indicating that the research theories of regional spatial structure at present, mainly focus on macroscopic region or urban space, but there is shortage of researches on county spatial structure, especially microscopic rural spatial structure. On such basis, 4 kinds of theoretical models and characteristics of regional spatial structure have been introduced. We build analysis index system of rural structural elements on the basis of 4 elements, and conduct rural spatial structural analysis, taking Jinhu County as an example. The result shows that rural spatial structure in Jinhu County is still at stage of nucleus-cluster development and rural system is not so sound. In addition, the passage network system of infrastructure has not taken shape, and county economy presents diseconomy of scale. The spatial interaction and association among towns in Jinhu County are weak. The characteristic analysis model of spatial structure in this research can objectively reflect regional characteristic of spatial structure.