Assessing the location potential for tourism development of traditional villages in Sichuan province, China.

With the advancement of the rural revitalization strategy, traditional villages are facing both opportunities and challenges for development. Tourism development is considered an effective means of preserving and utilizing traditional villages, and assessing the potential of village locations is crucial for decision-makers in formulating reasonable tourism development plans. Sichuan Province has 396 national-level traditional villages, but the distribution patterns and location potential across various spatial scales need further exploration. This study uses kernel density and nearest neighbor methods for spatial analysis and discovers for the first time that the traditional villages in Sichuan Province exhibit a "Six Cores and Five Belts" spatial distribution characteristic, with different aggregation patterns observed at the provincial, regional, and city scales. This study selects 25 indicators from five dimensions-natural environment, location and transportation, socio-economics, tourism market, and policy support-to construct a multi-indicator evaluation system for the comprehensive and quantitative assessment of the Location Potential for Tourism Development (LPTD) of traditional village. The research results show that the LPTD of traditional villages in Sichuan can be divided into three levels: high, medium, and low. High-potential villages (LPTD > 0.4047) are located in the Sichuan Basin, with high economic development levels, large population densities, convenient transportation, and favorable location conditions. Medium-potential villages (0.2523 < LPTD ≤ 0.4047) are distributed along the edges of the basin and central Ganzi Prefecture. Low-potential villages (LPTD ≤ 0.2523) are mostly found in the northern part of northwest Sichuan, the northern part of northeast Sichuan, and the Panxi area, with low economic development levels and weak transportation infrastructure. Through spatial autocorrelation and gravity model analysis, the location potential shows significant positive spatial autocorrelation at the provincial (Moran's I = 0.6721) and regional (Moran's I = 0.5386) scales, with a "Hot area" in the Sichuan Basin and two "Cold areas" in northwest Sichuan and the Panxi region. Three strong gravity areas are formed in the Chengdu Plain and southern Sichuan. Using spatially constrained multivariate clustering, the traditional villages in Sichuan are classified into four types: tourism-based, resource-based, ecology-based, and transportation-based. These findings fill the gap in the spatial understanding of the LPTD of traditional villages in Sichuan Province for the first time. Based on these findings, this paper proposes tourism development strategies for traditional villages from the perspective of location potential, aiming to promote the preservation, utilization, and sustainable development of traditional villages in Sichuan Province. The methodology of this study can be applied to other traditional village clusters worldwide, and the findings provide valuable insights for the protection and sustainable development of traditional villages globally.