Identifying the Conditions for Rural Sustainability through Place-Based Culture: Applying the CIPM and CDPM Models into Meibei Ancient Village

Jing Lin, Jianming Cai, Yan Han and Jiansheng Liu
Additional contact information
Jing Lin: Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China
Jianming Cai: Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China
Yan Han: Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China
Jiansheng Liu: College of Public Administration, Nanchang University, Nanchang 330031, China

Sustainability, 2017, vol. 9, issue 8, 1-15

Abstract: Transitional rural China faces more serious challenges in its sustainable development. How to regain the vital momentum of those historically and culturally preeminent villages, among over 680,000 administrative villages in total, has become the pressing agenda for all the stakeholders, due to the fact that these villages have huge potential to be the leverage for successful rural transition and new urbanization in China. This paper therefore tries to diagnose and identify the current situation of those villages from a cultural perspective by taking the Meibei ancient village as the case. By applying the proposed Cultural Inverted Pyramid Model (CIPM) and Cultural Dual Pyramid Model (CDPM) with seven layers, i.e., root/vision, value, symbol, hero, ritual, lifestyle, and governance & management, Meibei’s development mechanism has been systematically explored from a cultural perspective through the comparison between its past prosperity and present challenges. It is found that the great merit of Meibei’s past prosperity lied in the organic integration of cultural elements in all the layers through the five development dimensions, i.e., economic, social, institutional, environmental and cultural dimensions. The empirical study proves that CIPM is a useful tool for diagnosing and identifying the current situation of the village, while CDPM is an effective instrument for planning and designing a culture-embedded and improved place for the future. Unless Meibei can recreate a new cultural ecosystem with resilience fitting to its existed heritage with cultural excellence and tourism promotion, the village cannot catch up with its past prosperity. Finally, this paper calls for more in-depth culture-oriented research to improve the CIPM and CDPM paradigm to allow for the realization of rural sustainability, particularly from the perspectives of policy options and academic concerns.

Keywords: rural sustainability; culture perspective; Meibei ancient village; policy option; China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/9/8/1334/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/9/8/1334/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:9:y:2017:i:8:p:1334-:d:106356

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().