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Introduction
Towns and villages in China’s developed regions have undergone profound spatial structural changes over the past decades (Zhang et al., 2022). It has shown a faster pace and unique features under the national system, attracting the world’s attention (Chai et al., 2007; Long and Liu, 2016). From the 1980s to the 1990s, township enterprises1 have successively sprung up in China’s eastern coastal areas, which has greatly promoted the industrialization of towns and villages from the bottom up. A typical example is the so-called “Zhejiang Model” (“浙江模式”)—originating from Zhejiang Province, China, which is a regional growth pattern driven by the private economy and grassroots entrepreneurship through market-oriented reforms (Zhao, 2009). With the growth of foreign trade and the implementation of the coastal opening policy, these township enterprises are increasingly integrated into the regional division of labor. Since the new century, the strengthening of the link to the global production system and intensive spillovers from metropolises to the surrounding areas has led to industrial specialization and spatial separation in rural areas, promoting the flows such as labor, capital, logistics, and information in a larger range (Woods, 2007, Yang et al., 2016). In addition, rural tourism has developed rapidly, benefiting from the natural resources of the countryside and the huge urban demand for leisure and culture, with pioneering regions starting as early as the 1990s. It further drives the shift in rural space use from production to consumption (Wu et al., 2024).
With these macro trends, the functions of towns and villages have been transformed from a single agricultural form to an agriculture-industry-service integration model, which has further driven the rural space to become diversified, interactive, and dynamic, distinct from the traditional, homogeneous, and isolated form (Tian et al., 2014, Yang et al., 2016, Wu et al., 2024). The urban-rural relationship has also gradually changed from unilateral connection to bilateral interaction with complementary functions (Zhang et al., 2022; Qian et al., 2025). Under such a transforming context, the town-village spatial structure and the mechanisms behind it need to be re-recognized.
From a micro perspective, these changes result in a fundamental transformation of residents’ working and living modes in town and village areas. This is because the economic, social, traffic, and other functional flows between regions foster people’s...