The development of the social landscape of towns and villages at the county level in China currently lacks sustainability and urgently needs to be optimized. By developing a compound ecological capital system, the optimization of the social landscape will be an important process. Based on the dialectical relationship between landscape production and landscape sustainability, a theoretical framework is proposed as a paradigm of landscape structure. By highlighting the culture base and life proposed in ecosystem services (ES) described in the common international classification of ecosystem services (CICES) methodology, we propose a new social landscape order. We used Hequ County, Shanxi Province, China as the study case, evaluating the ecology level of social capital by gravity. In this paper, four types of optimization approaches for social landscape structure are proposed: completing urbanization (urbanized approach), shaping social landscape (prioritized development approach), protecting nature (scale-controlled approach), and increasing agricultural landscape (migrated and merged approach).
Social Landscape Optimization of Towns and Villages at the County Level by Developing a Compound Ecological Capital System