Conservation Planning of Historic and Cultural Towns in China Using Game Equilibrium, Conflicts, and Mechanisms

Planning serves as a vital tool for achieving orderly land management and utilization. The success of conservation planning hinges on its ability to translate cultural heritage preservation needs into rational allocation and guidance of land resources, ultimately realizing a win–win outcome that fosters cultural continuity, social harmony, and economic development. Historic and cultural towns are highly representative urban and rural historic and cultural heritage sites. However, the participation components in the conservation planning of historic towns are complex, and the misalignment of the functions, rights and responsibilities, and interest demands of the participants often leads to a loss of actual benefits. To help achieve a reasonable transformation of the protection needs of historic towns and guide the cultural inheritance and socially harmonious development of urban and rural construction, based on game theory and the logic of planning rights games, this paper begins with an understanding of the relevant laws and regulations, conducts an empirical analysis of the game processes and situations of conservation planning in two provinces and four towns, and incorporates publicly available data from the internet for argumentation to explore the game states and operation mechanisms of conservation planning in historic and cultural towns. The findings reveal the following regarding historic town conservation planning: (1) it proceeds lawfully and rationally, reflecting collective rationality; (2) it exhibits two equilibrium modes: relatively static and dynamic; (3) game conflicts mainly manifest as multi-planning conflicts and the resulting conflicts among systems and inter-systems. The game dynamics are influenced by the value of the historic town, resource allocation, and the relationship between rights, responsibilities, and interests. To overcome the game dilemma, it is essential to establish effective cooperative mechanisms at the legal and regulatory levels based on the value of the historic town, allocate resources reasonably, and achieve a balance between rights, responsibilities, and interests.