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 = 0.826, p < 0.01) and explains 63.7% of its variation (adjusted R² = 0.637), 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. An interval correction coefficient [0.64, 1.285] converts point prediction into interval prediction, absorbing non-spatial influences. For Huitong Village, renovation raised openness from 0.576 to 0.675, and the observed 800,000 visitors fell within the predicted interval, a deviation of only 0.6%. 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.