Discussion on the effect of topographic barrier on the morphology of Chinese mountainous cities: an example of Southwest China

Abstract

China is a mountainous country and mountains account for 69% of the country’s land area. Therefore, relevant scholars believe that the second half of Chinese development with high quality urbanization is in the mountainous region. Topographic barrier in this mountainous district have been produced unique morphology of mountainous cities which also have negative impacts such as excessive construction costs and information blocking. So we take mountainous cities in south-western region which own the most mountainous cities in China, as the research object to analysis how to achieve high-quality development with mountainous region in China. Firstly, we summarize the types of topographic barrier such as horizontal cutting, vertical limitation and integrated guidance to form four morphological types of mountainous cities including clump, ribbon, radial and group over time by figure-to-bottom relationship and typological analysis. Then this interweaving of natural and artificial built environment forms a generalized spatiotemporal evolution model of mountainous cities. Finally, this evolutionary process has also formed spatial effects of different scales from region, urban and block perspective, respectively. Therefore, this article expects to introduce a Chinese unique mountainous urban space, providing a reference for development of mountainous cities in other countries.