Evaluating changes in China’s Grand Canal’s cultural landscape over the past 20 years based on collective memory: The Yangzhou section as an example

The Grand Canal of China is a giant linear cultural heritage. Within its protected area, in addition to the registered heritage sites, there are a large number of everyday cultural landscapes closely related to residents’ daily lives. Over the past two decades, with the continuous advancement of spatial development, conservation, and utilization along the Grand Canal, these cultural landscapes within the protected area have undergone various changes. Determining whether such changes are positive, particularly whether they preserve and sustain the authenticity of the Grand Canal landscape, has become a technically significant issue with practical relevance. Previous studies have shown that relying solely on experts to make judgments does not help represent objective facts. Therefore, this study considered residents as evaluation subjects and developed a bottom-up, human-land relationship-based cultural landscape representation, evaluation, and cognition method based on Collective Memory Theory and Structural Equation Modeling. This study evaluates residents’ retrospective perceptions of landscape change through cross-sectional interview and questionnaire data. Within this framework, collective memory is regarded as the cognitive basis through which residents understand current changes in the canal landscape, whereas landscape authenticity is treated as the evaluative outcome for further judging whether the characteristic features of the Grand Canal landscape have been sustained. The study first identified the empirical dimensions of residents’ collective memory through interviews and coding, and further analysed the relationships between these dimensions and landscape authenticity. The results show that: (1) cultural memory and environmental memory significantly positively influence the behavioral intentions of coastal residents, while symbolic memory has a significant negative influence; (2) the behavioral intentions and life memories of coastal residents are significantly positively correlated with the authenticity of the Grand Canal landscape; (3) cultural memory and environmental memory indirectly influence the authenticity of the Grand Canal landscape through the complete mediating effect of the behavioral intentions of coastal residents. The mediating effects of structural models and behavioral intentions collectively indicate that local respondents have a clear understanding of the Grand Canal’s past and present. They believe that, apart from the waterways, ancient relics, and landscapes that evoke memories of life (bridges, docks), which have maintained the authenticity of the Grand Canal, the rest has changed. However, the vast majority of respondents collectively acknowledge this change and are forming a new collective memory of the Grand Canal.