Adaptability of traditional villages as tourist destinations in Yellow River Basin,China

Abstract

Tourism has become an indispensable aspect of rural development. For traditional villages with historical and cultural importance, whether the development of tourism had led to traditional villages being restricted or supported needs to be studied. Taking 684 traditional villages in the Yellow River Basin in China as an example, we used Adaptive Cycle Theory to construct an index system and explored the adaptability of Chinese traditional villages in terms of undergoing development for tourism by describing the spatiotemporal coupling and evolution process of village adaptation. Then, we constructed a binary logistic regression model to measure the adaptation differences for villages providing different tourism services. The results showed that from 2000 to 2018, the social adaptability of traditional villages tended to deteriorate and was spatially and regionally different. Compared with the traditional villages without tourism, in villages where tourism has been developed, the adaptability of villages dominated by agriculture is poor. Villages dominated by traditional national culture and ecological leisure agriculture showed higher adaptability. By exploring the adaptation model and evaluating the technological development of traditional villages, we provide support for enhancing the interaction between the external and internal resources of tourism-oriented traditional villages.