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Abstract The paper elaborated landscape character assessment system of small cities and towns, defined the assessment objects, application range of assessment fruits, specific evaluation methods and procedures. Taking Gexianshan Town in Pengzhou City for example, technical means for assessing landscape characters were adopted for the landscape assessment, which provided professional support for the future planning.
Keywords Small cities and towns, Landscape characters, Evaluation
Against the background of constant urban expansion, small cities and towns have become an important part of modern life. A small city or town with quality landscapes is a crucial base for the locals' recreation, entertainment, living, relaxation, and temperament cultivation, and a kind of "mini-city" with considerate scales, diversified ecological conditions and multiple types. Due to limitation of traffic conditions and location, historical landscapes, geographical features, and cultural customs of small cities and towns have always been inherited and preserved, which greatly enriches the type of human settlement and the layer of regional landscapes. Assessment of landscape characters in small cities and town is an essential task to define sense of place of townscapes, avoid "drastic" mutation in urban development, and maintain original ecological and humanistic characteristics.
1 Object of landscape character assessment and public cognitive complexity
1.1 Assessment object
Definitions of "landscape" and "character" are not clear, especially "character" is also mixed with feature, or characteristics1'1. "Landscape character" is a unique model generated from a certain union of different landscape elements, providing sense of place for its neighboring environment121. Landscape character makes the region unique, signifies a kind of "special, identifiable and harmonious" paradigm, it may be such natural elements as soil and terrain, or such humanistic elements as settlement and building. Therefore, it is the essential cause distinguishing landscape environments, and it includes no "good" or "bad" thing itself131. Only if characters of different regional landscapes are defined, it is possible to assess the landscapes precisely, and guarantee the future development planning, find the "sensitive point" of landscape orientation to benefit environmental, social and economic development. Assessment of landscape characters is a process of explaining landscape characters and making landscape decisions. The former contains identifying landscape (feature/character), graphic landscapes (state), differentiating landscapes (type) and describing landscapes (composition)141. Obviously, these elements constitute the landscape structural system, and the...