Cultural Spatial Patterns and Adaptive Reuse of Traditional Villages in a Mountainous County: A Case Study of Suichang County, Zhejiang Province

Traditional villages serve as the material carriers of traditional Chinese culture. Their cultural spaces, as concentrated reflections of rural humanistic spirit, face multiple crises, including the rupture of intergenerational transmission, functional decline, and spatial isolation. In mountainous counties, where the terrain is complex, resources are scattered, and locations are peripheral, the challenges of protecting and revitalizing cultural spaces are especially acute, yet holistic understanding at the county scale remains insufficient. Focusing on the 25 nationally listed traditional villages in Suichang County, Zhejiang Province, this study selected four representative villages as case studies: Hengkeng (steep-slope mountain), Caihe (gentle-slope hilly), Dushan (mountain-enclosed valley), and Changlian (river-valley plain). We established a comprehensive framework integrating a qualitative “text–space mutual corroboration” interpretation with space-syntax accessibility and isovist-based visibility analysis. The results demonstrate that cultural space nodes exhibit systematically higher accessibility and visibility than ordinary residences, and the coupling between the two dimensions differs sharply by type. Specifically, lineage culture spaces display high–high synergy; religious belief spaces show a low-accessibility–high-visibility mismatch; ritual education spaces occupy a moderate-accessibility–low-visibility position; meanwhile, basic livelihood and daily life spaces are accessibility-dominated. Furthermore, geographical type governs the coupling mode, shifting from linear mismatch on steep slopes, through axial synergy on gentle hills and centripetal aggregation in valleys, to axial serialization on plains. Based on these findings, four adaptive-reuse strategies are distilled. Complemented by a baseline information database and a prospective intelligent-evaluation framework, they provide transferable methodological guidance for planning and revitalizing the cultural spaces of traditional villages in mountainous counties.