Reconciling Livelihood and Tourism: A Data-Driven Diagnosis of Spatial Vitality in Small-Town China’s Historic Districts

This study addresses the critical conflict between livelihood preservation and commercial tourism in the residential historic districts of small-town China—a context often overlooked in urban studies. Taking Meizhou’s “One Town, Two Lanes” as a case, we propose a novel multi-source data fusion framework integrating POIs, population heatmaps, and questionnaire surveys. By applying Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), Poisson regression, and spatial correlation analysis, we quantitatively diagnose spatial disorders. The results reveal a dual-suppression mechanism: residential vitality, reliant on public services, is suppressed by commercial tourism, while tourist vitality is diminished by experience–quality gaps. This conflict manifests as pronounced vitality fractures. Our methodology and findings provide a replicable framework for diagnosing and resolving spatial conflicts in similar historic districts, emphasizing the imperative of prioritizing residential continuity.