**1. Introduction**

As a traditional agricultural country, China still has approximately 600,000 administrative villages, which bear the development and change of agricultural production, rural life, rural landscape, and local culture [1]. Village planning is an important guarantee to guide rural development and construction, which is separated from village construction. The earliest village construction can be traced back to the rural reconstruction movement in the early 20th century when the concept of village planning was not clearly proposed [2]. Village planning was put on the agenda not until the reform and opening up and then gradually standardized. In 2008, the Urban–Rural Planning Law was promulgated. This law elevated the legal norms of rural planning to the level of the "basic law" of the country, established the legal status of the village planning system, and clarified its planning content, mainly including the village construction planning and the overall planning of village land use [3]. The former focused on the specific arrangemen<sup>t</sup> of village construction land layout, whereas the latter focused on land use control [4]. Although the contents of the two types of planning were related, they were different and were managed by different departments. Coordination between departments is lacking, making it difficult for traditional village planning to play a practical role by ignoring the different needs of

**Citation:** Chen, J.; Wang, C.; Dai, R.; Xu, S.; Shen, Y.; Ji, M. Practical Village Planning Strategy of Different Types of Villages—A Case Study of 38 Villages in Shapingba District, Chongqing. *Land* **2021**, *10*, 1143. https://doi.org/10.3390/ land10111143

Academic Editors: Krystyna Kurowska and Cezary Kowalczyk

Received: 30 September 2021 Accepted: 24 October 2021 Published: 27 October 2021

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**Copyright:** © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

different villages and adopting a "one-size-fits-all" planning approach in the planning process [5]. To strengthen the leading guidance role of village planning and to promote its implementation, in May 2019, the Ministry of Natural Resources issued the "Notice on Strengthening Village Planning for Rural Revitalization," which explicitly proposed to focus on the preparation of practical village planning with multiple rules and regulations. In this issue, village planning is required to tailor to local conditions, not be greedy for large and comprehensive, and promote the preparation of classification. Practical village planning is the detailed planning outside the boundaries for urban development. Moreover, practical village planning is the legal basis for carrying out national land use development and protection activities, implementing land space use control, issuing planning permits for urban and rural construction projects, and carrying out various constructions in the rural area. This planning has become an important public policy tool for guiding and regulating village construction and governance and an important regulatory tool for achieving sustainable rural development [6]. Under the background of establishing the territorial spatial planning system, village planning is not only a pioneering and basic work for implementing the rural revitalization strategy but also the most basic and microscopic planning unit for implementing the control of all elements of territorial spatial planning in rural areas [7].

Under the guidance of the rural revitalization strategy, the trickle-down effect of industry-feeding agriculture is gradually formed, which brings new development opportunities to the countryside [8]. The vast rural villages in China are undergoing drastic changes and transformations [9]. How exactly to support the implementation of rural revitalization strategy through practical village planning and realize a new pattern of rural construction with urban-rural integration has become an important issue for Chinese rural development. China has considerable villages with grea<sup>t</sup> regional differences, and the classification of practical village planning needs to be based on a scientific classification of village types. Therefore, the study of village classification is of grea<sup>t</sup> significance for village planning. As a research hotspot of rural geography, it has been of considerable concern to Chinese scholars [10,11]. They have mainly studied the reconstruction of rural settlements [12,13], the quality of rural settlement [14,15], rural resilience [16], and rural development potential [17–19]. Scholars in other countries have mainly conducted studies on rural evaluation based on rural geography and regional economic theories, and most of them are functionally oriented to classify rural areas into types. Among developed countries, British scholar Crook proposed to construct a rurality index based on rural geography, evaluated the rurality of England and Wales, and classified them into five types: extremely rural, moderately rural, moderately non-rural, extremely non-rural and urban [20]. Terry, M. outlined four ideal types of rural space based on the social resource heterogeneity of villages, namely, protected villages, competitive villages, patriarchal villages, and proxy villages [21]. Ian H. and Sarah M classified the countryside into tourism-protected, competitive, large-farm, and dependent countryside based on the performance of various characteristics of the countryside [22]. Among the less developed countries, Indian scholar Sharma R.L. measured the level of economic diversification in India based on the percentage of rural non-farm population and used it as a criterion to classify villages into four categories: very high economic diversification villages, high economic diversification villages, low economic diversification villages, and extremely low economic diversification villages [23]. It is increasingly focused on the improvement of rural living conditions and sustainable development, and the trend of multidisciplinary integration is gradually emerging [24]. With the enrichment of basic data and the rapid development of GIS and RS technologies, the village classification methods have gradually changed from qualitative description and field survey to evaluation model construction [25,26], spatial clustering [27,28], and others. To sum up, relevant research on village classification had a variety of perspectives and methods, but the research scale mostly focused on the county and town scales, which can serve for the micro-scale research with more practical guiding significance and need to be further discussed. On the basis of existing research, this

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study measures village development potential from four aspects, that is, location, resource, economy, and development constraint. The future development direction of villages is precisely identified and scientifically classified to provide a basis for the classification and promotion of practical village planning.

### **2. Data and Methods**

### *2.1. Study Area*

Shapingba District is located in the west of Chongqing (106◦1436"–106◦3135" E, 29◦2713"–29◦4636" N) (Figure 1). This district belongs to the parallel ridge and valley area of the east Sichuan basin, showing a combination of hills, terraces, and low mountains. The complex landform structure is the main reason for its internal administrative boundary and its irregularity. Its climate belongs to the subtropical monsoon humid climate zone. After the adjustment of the administrative jurisdiction in 2019, the area is approximately 276 km2, with 22 towns (streets) and 49 administrative villages under its jurisdiction. The urbanization rate of the resident population is over 90%. In recent years, the urban expansion of Shapingba District has been rapid, and the rural space has been continuously squeezed. Considerable rural population flows into the city, and the problem of hollowing out of the countryside has become prominent. In the meanwhile, the deteriorating living conditions of rural houses and lagging infrastructure caused by early rapid urbanization have also constrained the development of the rural area.

**Figure 1.** Study area.

*2.2. Case Selection and Data Sources* 2.2.1.CaseSelection

According to the demand for the preparation of practical village planning, administrative villages with more than 80% of land requisitioned or included in the boundaries for urban development are not required to prepare a separate village plan. After excluding these two types of administrative villages, the administrative villages in Shapingba District that need to prepare planning include 38 administrative villages under the jurisdiction of nine towns (streets), which are the objects of evaluation in this study (Table 1).


**Table 1.** Administrative villages requiring planning in Shapingba District.

### 2.2.2. Data Sources

We have been cooperating with the Planning and Natural Resources Bureau of the Shapingba District for more than ten years on various projects, and have accumulated a large amount of data, which has laid a solid data foundation for this study. The data used in this study include spatial and attribute data. The spatial data come from three ways. The digital elevation model data (DEM, 30 m × 30 m) come from the Resources and Environmental Science Data Center (https://www.resdc.cn/, accessed on 25 September 2021). The township points come from Autonavi POI data (2019). Geological hazard data (2019), redlines for protecting the ecosystems data (2019), land acquisition data (2019), and land use vector data (2019) come from the Planning and Natural Resources Bureau of the Shapingba District. We extracted village-scale data, such as areas of the high-prone region of geological disaster, areas of redlines for protecting the ecosystems, areas of land acquisition, areas of cultivated land, areas of garden land, areas of construction land, and length of railway from them. We also calculated the total value of each administrative village using the ArcGIS zoning statistics module.

The attribute data come from field research and interviews. A total of 47 interviews were collected. The interviewees were the staff of township people's governments (subdistrict offices) in nine towns (streets) and the village branch secretaries and relevant grassroots staff in 38 administrative villages. We collected demographic data (total resident population, number of Communist Party members, number of migrant workers, number of people over 65 years old) and economic data (output value of primary, secondary, and tertiary industries and the area of machine-cultivated land) for each administrative village. We collected the number of township enterprises and family workshops including the number of natural and cultural landscape resources in each administrative village through the survey. For the few administrative villages with missing data, the data of the adjacent years were substituted.
