The theoretical logic and practical strategy of rural settlement restructuring: A perspective of reproduction of residential form

Residential form is an integrated manifestation of spatial, livelihood, and cultural configurations. It constitutes the objective of rural settlement restructuring while also serving as its mediating mechanism. Drawing on the theory of space production, this study examines and elucidates the theoretical logic of rural settlement restructuring within China's urban-rural integration context through the lens of residential form reproduction. Based on the theoretical analysis, this paper attempts to further extract practical strategies from established typical cases from four regions of China. As a comprehensive concept, residential form extends the analysis of rural settlement restructuring through its tripartite dialectical relationships. The crux of rural settlement restructuring lies in reorganizing resource elements and reforming property rights systems to establish a coupled "human-land-industry-rights" nexus, facilitating the reshaping of human-land relationships, adjustment of interpersonal dynamics, and reconstruction of value norms through collective praxis. Four representative cases demonstrate that rural settlement restructuring inherently embodies the value orientation of constructing "residence-industry communities", necessitating an "industry-property rights" linkage mechanism to organically integrate residential form. Locational conditions and initial residential form jointly determine a village's developmental potential and collective action capacity, defining power interactions between village actors and external entities, thereby molding spatial governance mechanisms that drive the reproduction of residential form. Specifically, a power-bridging relationship exists between villages and government, wherein the government provides elastic empowerment calibrated to local action capacity to supplement or stimulate autonomous agency. Concurrently, village actors and market actors share the property rights and economic elements during rural land marketization. Crucially, residential form reproduction extends the "society-space" dialectic of space production theory while foregrounding residential culture as an analytical dimension, offering significant explanatory power for rural restructuring rooted in China's cultural context and collective property rights system. This study provides an integrated framework for analyzing different viewpoints on the evolution of Chinese villages, and also offers localized and diversified governance strategies for rural settlement restructuring.