Study on the spatial-temporal structure of the urban-rural cultural integration in Wuhan metropolitan circle

The notion of urban-rural cultural integration(URCI) has become a new focus in cultural geography, given that the problem of the imbalance between urban and rural cultural development has raised great concern in the process of urbanization practice. The existing researches on URCI, however, are unable to effectively meet the application requirements of the integration of Chinese urban and rural culture, and also do not meet the internal demand for human geography discipline development. Taking Wuhan metropolitan circle as an example, this paper explicitly proposed the concept of integration degree of urban-rural culture based on a brief analysis of spatial- temporal pattern for urban- rural culture. Then, the spatial- temporal measure model of URCI was creatively constructed through analyzing the time dimension of URCI, the population who is sensitive to urban and rural culture, the cultural information flow between urban and rural areas, and the shortest path of cultural transmission from urban to rural area. On county/city scale, spatial-temporal structures and development patterns of URCI in the case from 1980 to 2010 were explored, with the method of entropy, factor analysis and network analysis. The research demonstrated that:(1) spatial- temporal development patterns of URCI, namely, the plaque- type development in the embryonic stage, the wave- like development in the formative stage, the corridor-type development in the stage of diffusion and agglomeration and the network development in the prosperous stage, generally complied with the point-axis theory of regional social and economic expansion;(2) they followed the basic law that the more the society and economy developed, the stronger the spatial correlation of the road network between urban and rural areaa was and the more cultural factors between urban and rural areaa flowed reciprocally, the more perfect the spatial structure of URCI became;(3)the development degree of spatial structure of urban-rural culture was also consistent with the rule of circle differentiation that the core area is greater than reception ward.