Work

Impact of Gentrified Rural Landscapes on Community Co-Build Willingness: The Differentiated Mechanisms of Immigrants and Local Villagers

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: Rural gentrification is transforming China’s countryside, yet the ways gentrified landscapes shape community co-build willingness across social groups remain unclear. Guided by the Hierarchy Effects Model (HEM) and Martin Phillips’ four-dimensional view of rural landscapes (material, symbolic, social, and living), this study develops a “landscape–emotion–intention” framework linking spatial–environmental continuity, cultural landscape transition, social interaction embeddedness, and new rural livability to community identity, sense of belonging, and co-build willingness. Based on 50 in-depth interviews in She Village, Nanjing, latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) is used to extract key themes, which are combined with the four-dimensional framework to construct a 25-item questionnaire; 376 valid responses from immigrants and local villagers are then examined through multi-group structural equation modeling and artificial neural networks for robustness and importance analysis. Results indicate that cultural landscape transition and new rural livability are the main drivers of identity and belonging among immigrants, whereas cultural landscape transition, spatial–environmental continuity, and social interaction embeddedness are more critical for local villagers; in both groups, sense of belonging is the strongest predictor of co-build willingness. The study embeds HEM within gentrified rural settings, operationalizes stakeholder perceptions via an LDA–SEM–ANN pipeline, and proposes differentiated strategies for inclusive rural community building and sustainable governance.

Source: Sustainability

DOI: 10.3390/su172310613

Authors: Zixi Guo, Ruomei Tang, Xiangbin Peng, Yanping Xiao, Qiantong Liang

Institutions: Nanjing Forestry University, Donghua University, Macao Polytechnic University

Language: English

Topic: Place Attachment and Urban Studies

Subfield: Sociology and Political Science

Field: Social Sciences

Domain: Social Sciences

SDGs: Sustainable cities and communities, Reduced inequalities

Open Access status: gold

Estimated APC paid: $2,896