Spatial Interaction and Cultural Integration in Ethnic Settlements: A China-Context Systematic Review
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.11113/ijbes.v13.n3.1764Keywords:
Ethnic minority settlements; Spatial interaction; Cultural integration; Settlement typology; Evaluation frameworksAbstract
Ethnic settlements in China's minority regions offer a built-environment setting for examining how spatial relations are organized in everyday life and, under some conditions, linked to broader questions of cultural integration. Yet disagreement persists over spatial interaction, cultural integration, and their indicator systems, limiting comparability across regions and methods. Existing studies also struggle to address three issues together: how interaction relates to integration, how typologies remain comparable, and how evaluation may support settlement conservation and planning more operationally. This systematic review synthesizes Chinese- and English-language studies published between 2000 and 2025 in Web of Science, Scopus, and CNKI. WoS/Scopus retrieval was global, but only China-context studies were included in quantitative reporting and mapping; CNKI trends are reported separately to reduce misinterpretation from cross-database differences. After deduplication and screening, the review corpus consisted of a trend corpus (n = 100) for descriptive mapping and an analytic core (n = 37) for thematic synthesis. The reviewed evidence clusters around four themes: spatial interaction and behavioral pathways; cultural integration and spatial expression; settlement typology and comparability; and evaluation frameworks and indicators, especially those related to cultural sensitivity. Across the reviewed studies, spatial generative logics are most consistently linked to routine socio-spatial interaction, while claims about cultural integration remain interpretive and unevenly supported. Direct evidence remains limited for testing integration pathways, establishing transferable typologies, and validating stable indicator systems. Three priorities follow: more comparable typological criteria, clearer triangulation between spatial analysis and field-based evidence, and culturally adaptive evaluation frameworks with workable indicators and procedures
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