Abstract:

Countryside is an important geographical unit, and rural geography is always an important branch of human geography. Cities have always been the focus of human geography, but the rural study does not get enough attention.With the development of industrialization and urbanization, rural enclosed structure is broken, rural landscape and the form of community is undergoing changing, the country begins to transform into the city. Due to its own characteristics, different regions affected by urbanization influence degree differ, rurality shows a different state. Each zone can be seen as a unified urbanity and rurality, which has no breaking point. The evaluation of rural index should be able to fully reflect overall characteristics of county, the difference between village and city, namely, the basic properties of the rural characteristics. In this paper, we establish the evaluation index system including the proportion of primary industry employment, per capita GDP, population density, the proportion of primary industry output, the proportion of 20-49 yearold man and other indicators based on the connotation of rurality. We use land use change survey data, the Statistical Yearbook in Jiangsu province,the 5th and 6th national population census with the help of SPSS, ArcGIS, Geoda software to evaluate the rurality of 51 counties (countylevel cities) in 2000 and 2010, which have great meanings not only for analyzing the degree of development of the national rural change, but also for supplying public services and finance in future, targeted measures to determine the direction of regional development.The results showed that:The rurality of county unit in Jiangsu province weakened gradually from 2000 to 2010, showing the spatial distribution of ladderlike situation. The rurality index of each county does not show completely random state, but there was a significant positive spatial correlation. Hotspots of rurality index in Jiangsu province located in the junction of Siyang and Shuyang with the core of the circle structure, cold spots concentrate in SuzhouWuxiChangzhou region where the rural industry developed quickly. The influencing factors of rurality transformation included five aspects: social environment, traffic, capital, policies, industrialization and urbanization. We did not find the phenomenon of rurality strengthening in the paper. If the phenomenon does happen in future, the research of management system and spatial structure construction will get more attention. We also can discuss rurality through questionnaire survey and interview to investigate the changes in rural customs, culture, ideas and other aspects. Whats more, it will have more realistic guiding significance to research the rurality, using more available data, based on villages