How Can Crowd Perception Methodologies Be Employed to Understand the Locality Characteristics of Small Towns Within the Jiangnan Water Network? From the Perspective of Urban–Rural–Wildland Integration

Serving as a link between cities and villages, small towns play a crucial role in reducing the disparity between urban and rural areas. The spaces of small towns in Southern Jiangsu Province not only showcase the landscape style of production–living–ecological but also embody local cultural characteristics, acting as a unique “container” for preserving the memory of Jiangnan water towns. However, during the urbanization process, these spaces often fail to respect the principles of landscape locality, instead favoring standardization and efficient designs that overlook human perspectives on landscape perception and understanding. This results in the “homogenization” and “heterogenization” of Jiangnan small towns landscape spaces. As county urbanization shifts toward improving human environments, human-scale spatial perception has become key to localized planning. By combining street view photos with deep learning, the ‘2bulu’ dataset supports large-scale analysis of crowd perception and precise detection of spatial and landscape features. This study investigated the proportions of landscape elements in the small towns’ town–rural–wilderness of Wujiang District that play a direct role in shaping people’s perceived visual identity and sense of cultural resonance, assessed the spatial distribution of perceived landscape locality scores, and revealed the positive or negative correlations between the proportions of visual landscape elements and the sense of place. This study analyzed perceived landscape locality in Wujiang small towns based on crowd perception, exploring which town–rural–wilderness landscape elements are perceived as having local character, and highlighted the importance of preserving locality through integrated town–rural–wilderness landscape elements. The findings offer insights for quantitative measuring landscape locality perception and support planning of appropriate local landscapes in Jiangnan small towns.