*5.3. Policy Suggestions for the Reform of the Rural Homestead System*

Although the state requires residential construction by rural residents to comply with the village and town construction plan and has carried out the pilot work regarding the paid use of homesteads in an orderly manner, we found that some towns in Dingzhou City did not adequately control the expansion of rural residents during the period of "paid use" of homesteads. The above phenomenon mainly occurs in towns far from the city, such as Zhuanlu Town, Dalu Zhuang Town, Dongting Town, Dongwang Town, and Haotou Zhuang Hui Township, while the expansion of rural settlements in towns close to the city, such as Mingyue Dian Town and Zhoucun Town, has been effectively suppressed. This shows that there may be some deviations in policy implementation in remote areas of Dingzhou. It is therefore necessary to strengthen the management of homesteads in remote towns and towns. Increasing the publicity and guidance of homestead policies in remote towns and towns and improving the implementation of policies in these areas should be considered.

As a pilot city for the reform of the rural homestead system, Dingzhou should also strengthen its organisation of rural settlements. In recent years, the implementation of policies such as "one house for one household" and "connecting increase and decrease" means that the growth rate of rural settlements in Dingzhou has slowed down, and the disorderly expansion of rural settlements has been effectively controlled, however, our analysis of the spatial pattern of rural settlements suggested that rural settlements in some townships in Dingzhou are small in scale and scattered in layout, including the northern part of Mingyue Dian Town, the eastern part of Kaiyuan Town, the southern part of Chang'an Lu Street, the southeastern part of Liqin Gu Town, and Yangjia Zhuang Town. The government should therefore consider optimising and adjusting the land use scale and internal structure of rural residential areas. While organising rural residential areas, the spatial layouts of Mingyue Dian Town, Liqin Gu Town, Kaiyuan Town, and Yangjia Zhuang Town should be strengthened. This is more concentrated and intensive and promotes orderly and rational land use. Reforming the rural homestead system is also important for the future development of rural residential areas in Dingzhou City. Dingzhou

City could revitalise idle homesteads through the development of farmhouses, homestays, rural tourism, and so on and promote the construction and development of rural areas.

### *5.4. Limitations of This Study and Future Research Directions*

The data for different years used in this article are slightly different, but we have adopted some methods to reduce errors caused by the data source. The data resolution (2 m) of 1962 and 1972 is different from that used in other years. The method we used was to firstly convert the spatial data for all years into unified geographic coordinates and define a unified projection; resample the data from 1962 and 1972, and change its spatial resolution to 30 m. Once the operation is complete, we unified the geographic coordinate system, projected coordinate system, and resolution of the data. Due to data transformation, however, there are still some foreseeable errors. When we converted the rural settlement data from 2 meters to 30 meters in 1962 and 1972, and the area increased by 0.087 hectares and 0.0109 hectares, respectively. The deviations were all less than 0.01%, and these deviations may cause slight changes in rural settlements at the pixel edge. In the process of analysing the changes to the spatial pattern of rural settlements, we analysed the effect of policy factors. In real society, there are many factors of the spatial pattern of rural settlements. Spatial elements such as roads, areas of water, and distances from cities and towns will also affect the distribution of rural settlements. In this study, however, these factors were assumed to be stable.

According to our understanding and analysis of the current research status and the thinking about the limitations of this paper, we believe that future research could involve the following: (1) analysing changes in the spatial pattern of rural settlements in other regions and examining whether the changes to rural settlements in each region conform to the relationship curve of the "policy-scale of rural settlements"; (2) considering the effect of other factors on the changes to the spatial pattern of rural settlements, such as population, roads, water areas, and so on. (3) Simulating and predicting the spatial pattern of rural settlements in the future according to the current trend in rural settlements policy.

### **6. Conclusions**

This paper took rural settlement policy as its basis, analysed the scale and pattern changes of rural settlements according to Maslow's psychological needs theory and game theory, and identified the relationship curve of "policy-scale of rural settlements" in different periods using Dingzhou City, China as an example for empirical research. We analysed the evolution of the spatial scale of rural settlements in Dingzhou from 1962 to 2020 under the influence of this policy. In terms of data acquisition, decrypted military satellite images were used for visual interpretation so as to obtain long-term historical data and extract the historical spatial information of rural settlements in Dingzhou. We used Arc GIS software to perform spatial analysis on the data for rural settlements in Dingzhou City and used the medium- and long-term land use maps of Dingzhou City to explore the evolution law of rural settlements in Dingzhou City. According to the changing trend of rural settlements in Dingzhou over the past 60 years, this paper divided the changing processes of the spatial distribution of rural settlements in Dingzhou into an expansion pattern, merge pattern, retreated pattern and urbanisation pattern. The effect of policies in different periods on the evolution of the spatial pattern of rural settlements was thus analysed. From 1962 to 2020, the total area of rural settlements in Dingzhou showed an increasing trend, with a total increase of 8354.97 ha (73%). Kaiyuan Town, Mingyue Dian Town, Xicheng Qu Street, Xizhong Town, Zhoucun Town, and Ziwei Town have expanded significantly in the past 60 years. The area of rural settlements in Zhoucun Town changed from 530.33 hectares in 1962 to 1225.08 hectares, which is an increase of 131%. The average annual growth rates for 1962–1972, 1972–1990, 1990–2000, 2000–2010, and 2010–2020 were 0.29%, 1.17%, 1.81%, 1.26%, and 0.05%, respectively.

The relevant policies of rural settlements since the founding of the People's Republic of China have been divided into five periods according to the node events issued by the

policy: the period of transition from "private ownership of farmers" to "one homestead, two systems", the period of the "unified planning" of homesteads, the period of the "paid use" of homesteads, the period of "connecting increase and decrease" of homesteads, and the period of "separation of three rights" of homesteads. During these five periods, policy has played a role in regulating, guiding, and distributing the changes to rural settlements. The growth rate of rural settlements was relatively slow in the period of transition from "private ownership of farmers" to "one homestead, two systems". The main policy reason for this was that rural homesteads changed from private ownership to "one homestead and two systems", and the expansion of rural settlements was inhibited. During the period of "unified planning" for homesteads, with the deepening of reform and opening up, there was a boom in building houses in rural areas, and the growth rate of rural settlements increased. During the period of the "paid use" of homesteads, although the state had strengthened the management of rural settlements, they continued to increase in area. During the period of "connecting increase and decrease" of homesteads and the period of the "separation of three rights" of homesteads, some residential township areas began to be vacated due to the implementation of policies such as "one house for one household" and "connecting increase and decrease", and the growth rate of rural residential areas slowed down. For example, the growth rates of Dongting Town, Dongwang Town, Gaopeng Town, Kaiyuan Town, Mingyu Dian Town, Nancheng Qu Street, and Xingyi Town were all lower compared to the previous period.

**Author Contributions:** Conceptualization, W.S.; methodology, C.C.; software, C.C.; validation, W.S. and C.C.; formal analysis, W.S. and C.C.; investigation, C.C.; resources, W.S.; data curation, C.C.; writing—original draft preparation, C.C.; writing—review and editing, W.S.; visualization, W.S. and C.C.; supervision, W.S.; project administration, W.S.; funding acquisition, W.S. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** This research was supported by the Projects of National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant numbers 42071233 and 41671177).

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.
