Abstract:

Cultural integration is one of the most important fields in Cultural Geography. Especially, urbanrural cultural integration has become a highlight in academic and political circles. Urbanrural cultural integration refers to two paralleled cultural systems, the factors of which interact and merger each other to form an organic and harmonious culture system. Using a case study of Wuhan City Circle, this paper aims to construct Measure Index System (MIS), around spatial measure of integration for urbanrural cultural integration, following scientific, general and practical principles. The MIS is established from following levels of four functional indexes—urbanrural integration in cultural resources index, cultural factors index, cultural industries index and cultural development index, twelve goal decomposition indexes and twenty-four detailed indicators. By using the method of factor analysis, we extract three principal divisors—economic divisor, potential divisor and security divisor, and then compute the integration degree for the fortyeight counties. According to the computation, four strength regions are divided, which include the fullyintegrated region, wellintegrated region, weakintegrated region and weakerintegrated region. We argue that the spatial disparity of urbanrural cultural integration in Wuhan City Circle, by and large, presents the structure that Wuhan city is the center of cultural integration and as the distance increasing, the intensity decreases, especially along with “JingGuang” railway and the Yangtze river economic zone, the counties in which shows a stronger integration than other regions with the same distance. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the difference of urban-rural cultural resources is the fundamental factor causing the spatial structure disparity. The paper demonstrates that 1) the essence of urbanrural cultural structure disparity is resulted by the cultural resource difference between urban and rural. Culture resources can bring about the direct and indirect economic benefits, including cultural heritage, cultural groups, culture investment, and culture construction and so on. In the process of integration, narrowing the gap between urban and rural cultural resources will enhance the level of cultural integration through exploring the rural culture resources, organizing effectively cultural activity and improving the comprehensive quality of rural people; 2) to improve the cultural system is the key point for the integration. Urbanrural cultural system is constituted by material, spiritual, behavioral and institutional factors which form the cultural structure according to certain combination; 3) the foundation of integration is to harmonize urbanrural cultural industries. Cultural industries are part of cultural enterprises, which fully reflect the economic attribute of culture. Thus the harmony of cultural industries is the order and powerful way for the integration; 4) the ultragoal of integration is the scientific development of urbanrural culture. Urbanrural cultural integration is a process of preferential orientation, in which rural traditional culture will be critically inherited, and urban culture selectively absorbed. It is a twoway evolution where excellent culture will be taken in, while backward one abandoned. It must be a process, in which only based on the reorganization of disparity and complementarity between urban and rural area, the interaction between them will go on the track of being order, scientific and gradually improved