Abstract:

With the rapid development of industrialization and urbanization, the rural settlements function has shown an increasingly strong trend towards spatial differentiation and diversification. Though discussion on rural settlements is becoming hot, little special attention has been given to rural settlements function. From the viewpoint of utility theory of value and concept of demand and supply, this paper discussed the meaning, classification and spatial heterogeneity and temporal variability of rural settlements function, then a multifunctionality assessment index system and an index analysis model were set up, later, based on the village scale, this paper evaluated and graded the functions of agricultural production, industrial production and commercial trading, daily life, health services, cultural and educational services, ecological service protection and comprehensive function. The results were as follows. Agricultural productionoriented functional areas were mainly distributed in western and northern areas which were far from the city and highway. Industrial production and commercial tradingoriented areas and culturaleducational servicesoriented indices were gradually weakened from city and towns to remote areas and from areas along the Yangtze River to the north. Ecological and cultural conservation areas were concentrated in the northeastern part. The composite function on the village scale emerged polycentric structure in the Qidong City. With gradually increasing distance from the strong function center, the composite indices became smaller, meanwhile, the function types of strong center were different from each other