Regional habitat units in the context of urban-rural China: Concept, mechanism and features

In the context of regional urbanization, large-scale city regions are becoming the main form of human habitats worldwide. However, top-down regional integration policy faces the risk of being ineffective because politics- and economy-oriented city regions are deficient in local culture, regional identity and spatial logic. City regions emphasize a nodal system centred around multiple cities but ignore large rural hinterlands and wild lands, which calls into question their approach to ecological sustainability. In China, traditional settlements are region-based place systems, which are spatially manifested as town-village-field continuums. After undergoing urban-rural dual development in modern times, Chinese society has now entered the stage of ‘urban-rural China’. Based on the above background, this study presents a conceptual framework of ‘regional habitat units' (RHUs) from the perspective of cultural geography and human settlement science. This concept emphasizes three core elements: 1) a hyper-city regional scale; 2) continuous spatial composition of ‘built settlement−semi-built and semi-natural environment−wild nature’; 3) a formation mechanism based on placeness and regional identity. This study shows that RHUs can provide a cultural-geographic analytical framework for regional urbanization in China and the rest of the world, offer an alternative spatial form to future human settlements, and enrich literature on city-regionalism.