Studies on rural transformation in the context of urbanization have always analyzed it from a single linear perspective, either top-down or bottom-up. This leads to simplistic generalizations of rural transformation models and the standardization of policy implementation. Based on the TPSN analytical framework, this study adds the temporality dimension to form a more comprehensive TPSNT framework. This paper explores the complex construction of rural space in rural transformation from the five dimensions of “territory, place, scale, network and temporality“ and takes the urban village, Hongren, in Kunming City, China, as a case study to analyze the specific transformation process of a village. The research revealed the following: First, in the face of land loss caused by government land acquisition, traditional rural autonomous organizations that have been hidden under the modern governance system have been revived under the influence of traditional elites and completed bottom-up territorialization by using some “maneuver spaces “to form a spatial base for negotiation with the government. Second, the cohesion of traditional rural autonomous organizations has increased during this process, and with the help of mobile capital such as media and personal connections, they have developed social networks that transcend the spatial boundaries of villages. Third, these newly constructed social networks are used to carry out various political strategies at various scales and finally negotiated with the government to rewrite the planning plan so that the village can continue to develop and integrate into the city. Finally, the analysis of the temporal dimensions of Hongren village revealed that even within the same village, changes in the other four dimensions develop dynamically, and rural transformation is an ongoing process. Therefore, when the government deals with rural issues in the process of urbanization, it should avoid a one-size-fits-all approach. Unified policy implementation standards will have an irreversible negative impact on rural autonomous organizations.

The importance of special contexts and historical contingency in explaining the mechanism of human-environment interactions is being increasingly emphasized by human geographers. However, their studies lack appropriate theories and an operational framework to apply a “contextualization” epistemology to explain human-environment interactions. Based on the theory of event ecology, this study establishes a new framework and illustrates it by presenting a case study of the world heritage site of the Honghe Hani Rice Terraces (HHRT). This case study demonstrates that in the HHRT, although it is overwhelmingly believed that the sharp increase in the numbers of restaurants and hotels resulted in increased water usage and, consequently, a decreased amount of water for irrigation, in fact, the dry local terraces were mainly caused by continuously decreased precipitation, the planting of water-consuming crops in forests and deforestation in recent years. These factors were not objectively considered primarily because the unbalanced opportunities for residents to participate in tourism led to significant conflicts in the local community. Thus, the locals exaggerated the contribution of tourism to the dry terraces because they wanted the outsiders pay more attention to these conflicts. This study suggests that the new research framework can effectively avoid presupposition and presumption caused by the prior cognition among researchers and local people to objectively recognize the causes of changes in human-environment interactions. In addition, this study demonstrates that it is necessary to analyze the mechanism for changes in human-environment interactions in detail from the perspectives of local political, economic, and social contexts to enhance the sustainable development of cultural landscape heritage sites.

The integrated development of manufacturing and modernized service (IDMMS) is an important direction for the transformation and upgrading of manufacturing. Building upon value co-creation, industry chain theory and the industrial boundary literature, this paper explores an analytical framework of IDMMS, combining theoretical and empirical evidence. Then, this study constructs several indicators for measurement of industrial integration. The results indicate that: (1) manufacturing has more self-circulation, and the degree of backward correlation between the modernized services and the manufacturing is weak, while the support and driving effect of the manufacturing is insufficient; (2) most industrial sectors play a relatively stable role in influencing production demand. The findings reveal that there exist several problems referring to industry and enterprises. Finally, this paper discusses the mechanism of IDMMS and reaches its conclusions. The conclusions provide a comprehensive and detailed industrial understanding of the formation of comprehensive and systematic regional economic strategies and suggest targeted industrial policies to achieve sustainable development.

The coexistence of conservation and degradation is a challenge for protected areas, and unequal political and social power is the mechanism underlying this conservation paradox. The World Heritage site of the Honghe Hani Rice Terraces (HHRT) has important natural and cultural value, but despite the enormous investment in protecting the site, the rice terraces continue to degrade, and much of the degradation has been unexpected. This study attempts to reveal the mechanism of these unintended protection outputs from the perspective of power relations. After reviewing the literature on the political ecology of protected areas, this study further considers the conceptual framework of power in view of the ambiguity of the concept and integrates the themes from research on protected areas into the power analysis framework of political ecology. Three aspects of the power process and environmental impact of heritage sites are analyzed: the actor network, conservation discourse and natural reconstruction. The results reveal that power among actors in the HHRT has changed over the course of continuous interaction, power has been produced and re-established in different relational networks, and the exercise of power has changed and reshaped the natural environment of the heritage site through a series of spatial planning decisions. Conservation discourse related to heritage is an important way for actors to establish and exercise power. However, due to spatial differences in the allocation of power, local development opportunities are unbalanced. In this unbalanced relationship, in order to maintain or strive for development opportunities and achieve economic development, residents of the HHRT have reshaped the natural environment by changing their farming methods and traditional planting methods, posing a potential threat to the sustainable development of the heritage site.

As global sustainability debates increasingly stress the coupling of social power and ecosystem performance, this study examines the Honghe Hani Rice Terraces as a long-term hydrosocial system. Drawing on historical political ecology, we develop a topographic impact model that links terrain-driven water flows with governance nodes and village institutions across successive regimes—native chieftaincy, people’s communes, and the household responsibility system. Using archival sources, gazetteers, policy documents, and secondary literature, we trace how rules of water allocation, lineage- and village-level cooperation, and ritual/managerial authorities jointly stabilized the terraces’ irrigation network and landscape productivity. While recent restoration policies have improved certain biophysical indicators, the fragmentation of social organizations and uneven access to water and land have heightened vulnerability and management costs in some locales. Our analysis identifies strong institutional continuity in coordination logics encoded in the irrigation infrastructure and terrain, which underpins the terraces’ long-run functioning despite regime shifts. We argue that sustainable governance should avoid a simplistic return to tradition; instead, it should rebuild local subjectivity and institutional resilience, revitalize collaborative mechanisms, clarify multi-level rights and responsibilities, and align contemporary incentives with historically proven coordination rules. Embedding historical experience within modern policy design can better sustain this world-heritage cultural landscape as a coupled human–water system.

1. With accelerating development and openness in China’s border regions, cross-border mobility among local residents has become an everyday reality. This trend has stimulated economic exchange and ...