Water-related cultural heritage architecture (WRCHA) represents a globally significant and potentially hybrid heritage found across river basins worldwide. Its spatial and temporal evolution characteristics offer insight into the development trends of river basin environments, yet their value within water-related cultural and environmental systems remain incompletely assessed. This study undertakes qualitative and quantitative analyses of the historical spatial and temporal distributions, influencing factors, and environmental changes affecting the water-related culture, climate, population, and urban areas of 295 WRCHA sites in the Li River Basin of China, employing drought–flood indices, GIS analyses, random forest algorithms, and other methodologies. The results reveal that (1) the Lishui Basin contains a significant distribution pattern of agglomeration for WRCHA within the river basin, concentrated along the river, at low altitudes, with minimal terrain variation, and radiating around ancient governance centers, with varying increases observed across different periods and aggregation zones and with significant spatial and temporal heterogeneities; (2) the distribution pattern is influenced by joint natural and human factors, closely tied to variables such as the river network density, DEM, population changes, and distance to ancient government sites; (3) the combination of the architecture’s location and elevation, along with drought–flood curves, reflects the position of the ancient riverbed of the Lishui River and its historical maximum water level. The quantity of new constructions, in conjunction with the distance from ancient government centers and the trends in population change, thus indicates the urban scale and the frequency and severity of disasters. This study provides a research paradigm and historical reference model for investigating environmental changes in watershed systems, aiding in clarifying the historical human–water symbiosis pattern in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River. Such insights will furnish a scientific basis for future regional ecological planning and watershed environmental management.

Urban cultural tourism increasingly affects how cities manage visitor flows, cultural assets, and everyday urban life, making governance more complex as tourism growth creates uneven pressures and benefits. Existing Smart Tourism approaches improve connectivity and prediction but offer limited support for comparing the consequences of alternative interventions. This review reconceptualizes Metatourism as a problem-driven, simulation-based governance framework through which policy-relevant urban relationships are represented, alternative interventions are tested, stakeholder adaptation and policy spillovers are examined, and multidimensional outcomes are evaluated under uncertainty. Using a concept-centric, systematized integrative review of the literature across tourism, urban studies, planning, information systems, computer science, and governance research, the study clarifies the relationship between Metatourism, Smart Tourism, metaverse tourism, and tourism digital twins. The synthesis develops a recursive governance architecture linking sensing, representation, simulation, intervention, evaluation, and feedback; identifies four urban governance mechanisms; and derives seven theoretical propositions concerning platform-mediated value distribution, resident legitimacy, representational adequacy, policy spillovers, agent calibration, cultural-value conversion, and participatory credibility. It also identifies four implementation challenges and five directions for future research. Its main contribution is to shift Metatourism from a technology-centered idea toward an accountable decision-support framework that makes policy trade-offs, uncertainty, and distributional effects more visible before interventions are implemented.