Toward a Livable, Workable, Beautiful, and Harmonious Countryside: A Neo-Endogenous Development Framework for Revitalizing Traditional Villages

Traditional villages are regarded as living fossils of human civilization, and their sustainable development has attracted widespread global attention. However, balancing the conservation of cultural heritage in traditional villages with residents’ modern living needs remains a critical challenge. Despite extensive research, no viable pathway has been identified to resolve this contradiction. The current study innovatively proposes a tripartite framework based on a neo-endogenous development framework to revitalize traditional villages into a livable, workable, beautiful, and harmonious countryside (LWBHC). The framework is a multifaceted concept that includes cultural living inheritance, space adaptation renewal, and industrial value transformation. To deeply understand the application and effectiveness of this framework, this study employs a mixed-methods approach, combining qualitative and quantitative analyses while focusing on two traditional villages in southwestern China for empirical validation. The results indicate that the proposed framework demonstrates strong explanatory power and practical applicability in guiding the construction of LWBHC in traditional villages, effectively revealing the development logic and evolutionary characteristics of the case villages. Furthermore, specific implementation strategies based on the three-dimensional framework are proposed to advance the transformation of traditional villages into LWBHC. This research provides a replicable model for conserving and developing traditional villages in other regions of China and similar global contexts, enabling more traditional villages to achieve harmonious development while perpetuating human civilization.