Exploring the relationship between the tourist behavior and the spatial characteristics for rural tourism

Abstract

Abstract With global urbanization, rural tourism has become a thriving trend for urban-rural sustainable development in addition to the urban landscape. However, research on rural landscape planning is still lacking. The topography of the rural areas is complex, with mountains and buildings arranged in accordance with the terrain, and pedestrian data is difficult to collect. Therefore, this study adopts mixed methods to obtain high-precision data. This study aims to investigate the relationships between tourist behavior and spatial characteristics. The results indicated that (1) Different rural spaces formed an uneven distribution of tourists’ spatial-temporal behavior characteristics, which could be attributed to three potential factors: easy space accessibility, good visual permeability, and herd mentality; (2) Visual space had a strong influence on guiding tourists compared to the passable space; (3) Historical trees, heritage buildings and cultural legacy are the positive influencing cultural factors for tourist attraction in spaces. Furthermore, these findings provided rationales to mobilize the utilization of the rural landscape resources and enhance the sustainable urban-rural development. These findings and methods improve our understanding of the temporal–spatial tourist behavior in rural tourism, which is of great significance for rural tourism planning and cultural legacy protection.