Sustainable development strategy of rural built-up landscapes in Northeast China based on ANP approach

With village revitalization and new rural construction, the landscape of Chinese villages is undergoing fundamental changes. Due to delayed construction, ecological degradation, and backward in management, rural settlements have many problems in the planning and construction process in Northeast China, such as lacking local characteristics, and natural environment destruction. Rural built-up landscapes are a complex combination of buildings, settlements, natural landscapes, and cultural landscapes. How to improve rural built-up landscapes is an important issue in village planning, which can provide a beautiful and livable countryside for farmers. The purpose of this paper is to structure a multiple-criteria decision-making (MCDM) analysis for the sustainable development of rural built-up landscapes. Analytic Network Process (ANP) approach is employed in the research to find out the key factors of sustainable rural built-up landscapes in the decision-making procedure of rural planning. The ANP model is structured with 3 criteria (settlement forms and structures, regional cultural characteristics, ecological and natural resources) and 16 sub-criteria. The results show that the settlement layout complying with the terrain is the most important factor, followed by the continuation of traditional architectural style, natural landscape restoration, and village vitality. Decision makers and planners should dedicate more attention to these aspects in the rural construction and landscape planning. This paper also presents the ranking of important sub-criteria and several sustainable development strategies are proposed.