Evaluation and type identification of village development potential in Fengjie County

Objective evaluation of village development potential and scientific identification of village types are the prerequisite and basis for promoting rural revitalization by classification．Taking Fengjie County of Chongqing as the research area, the index system in this paper was constructed from four dimensions, including topography, traffic, Village size and resources．TOPSIS evaluation, SOFM network model and system clustering were used to comprehensively evaluate and identify the types of 332 administrative villages (excluding communities) in the research area．Meanwhile, the characteristics and development paths of each type were also analyzed in this paper．The results show that: 1) The topographic background and traffic location values of each village generally present a spatial pattern of high in the middle and low in the north and south; the distribution characteristics of village scale and resource endowment are not obvious, and the two have a negative correspondence; the spatial aggregation of the dimension values of each village is not significant, mainly in the middle and low grades．2) The proximity values of all villages showed a central high, low north-south and linear high-value cluster distribution pattern along the Meixi River．And the number of each level presents a normal distribution, mainly low-level．3) The villages in the study area are divided into 24 types by SOFM model, each of which has the characteristics of large dispersion and small aggregation distribution; and the system cluster method is used to merge these villages into 6 types from the aspects of development level and four dimensions．In terms of quantity, these villages are dominated by Ⅱ, Ⅳ, Ⅴ and Ⅵ, accounting for 78.92% of the total．While in terms of area, these villages are dominated by Ⅳ, Ⅴ and Ⅵ, accounting for 70.05%．On the whole, the villages in the study area have been developed to different degrees．In order to further promote the development of these villages, it is necessary to take gradual development strategies that give full play to the advantages and disadvantages of different types of villages．The results of this paper can provide the decision-making basis for the study of the classification of village development, poverty alleviation and rural revitalization strategies．