Spatial Openness as a Predictor of Cultural-Tourism Volume in Traditional Cantonese Villages

Cultural tourism drives rural revitalization in China, yet traditional villages with comparable heritage resources differ sharply in the number of visitors they attract. Focusing on the single spatial variable of openness, this study examines nine comb-shaped Cantonese villages in the Pearl River Delta, classifies their layouts into typical-comb, curved-comb, and mesh-comb types, and builds a three-tier openness-evaluation system of ten AHP-weighted indicators covering external accessibility, internal connectivity and public-space configuration. External transportation accessibility dominates the weighting (0.653). Openness correlates strongly with annual tourist volume (r = 0.853, p < 0.01), and a log-linear specification explains 72.8% of the variation (adjusted R2 = 0.689), whereas layout type alone is not significant (p = 0.238). Mesh-comb villages attain the highest openness (0.683), and typical- and curved-comb villages the lowest. A scenario coefficient [0.63, 1.285] converts point prediction into interval prediction, and a residual-based 80% statistical band [0.29, 3.47] expresses model uncertainty. For Huitong Village, renovation raised openness from 0.576 to 0.675, and the predicted volume is reported as an interval. These findings establish openness as a quantifiable predictor of cultural-tourism attractiveness and yield a “limited porosity” strategy for suitability evaluation, scheme comparison and management decisions.