Traditional villages, as forms of significant cultural heritage, have garnered global scholarly attention. This study focuses on the traditional village clusters in Qiandongnan Prefecture, a UNESCO World Heritage site, which includes 415 nationally designated villages. Based on spatial relational analysis and other methods, this study explores the intrinsic relationship between the spatial connectivity of traditional village clusters and their development. The findings are as follows: 1. The spatial distribution of villages exhibits a “dense core, sparse periphery, and localized jumps” pattern. 2. There are five types of development, with over 70% based on agriculture and low industrial differentiation. 3. The spatial connectivity network is clustered, with overall connectivity but a lack of internal coherence, forming a hierarchical network constrained by geography. 4. The spatial connectivity is relatively unstable, highly vulnerable, and exhibits a clear core-periphery structure, where geographical proximity determines basic connections and functional uniqueness drives value-added connections. 5. The overall development potential of these villages is assessed as medium to low. Enhancing network connectivity can foster comprehensive development, and adjusting spatial connectivity could improve its development potential. The study proposes a two-tiered optimization strategy based on the intrinsic connectivity and development characteristics of these villages, providing insights into the development of traditional villages in other regions and cultural heritage areas worldwide.

Urban systems are the spatial carriers of social and economic relations at the regional level, and their relational and structural resilience are key to regional coordination and sustainable development, attracting widespread attention from scholars. In order to analyze the internal relationships of urban agglomerations in underdeveloped mountainous regions and optimize their spatial resource allocation and resilience, this study takes the urban agglomeration of Qiandongnan in China as an example and researches their internal relationships, development potential, and influencing factors based on quantitative methods such as social network analysis. The results show that the urban cluster in Qiandongnan presents “large dispersion and small aggregation” distribution characteristics, with the karst landscape as the main influencing factor; the spatial network exhibits a scale-free morphology with an obvious core–periphery structure, demonstrating moderate stability but poor completeness, weak equilibrium, and low overall resilience; only 15.61% of nodes demonstrate high competitiveness; urban units with functional roles serve as critical network nodes; urban units’ development potential is divided into three tiers (with 47.31% being medium-high), although overall levels remain low; and the development potential, overall network, individual network, and network resilience of urban units are all positively correlated, with economic and transportation development conditions being the main influencing factors. Based on the abovementioned findings, this study proposes a “multi-level resilience promotion path for network structure optimization”, which provides a theoretical basis and optimization control methods for the reconstruction and synergistic development of urban agglomerations. It also serves as a reference for the development planning of urban systems in other underdeveloped mountainous regions.