Religious Building Spatial Configurations Across Ethnic Inter-Embedding Contexts in Traditional Villages: Implications for Sustainable Spatial Planning and Cultural Landscape Conservation in the Hehuang Region, China

Religious buildings are important spatial nodes for ritual practice, collective memory, and everyday public life in multiethnic traditional villages. However, quantitative evidence on how their intra-village spatial configurations vary across ethnic inter-embedding contexts—and how such variation may inform sustainable spatial planning and cultural landscape conservation—remains limited. This study examines 73 settlement spatial units derived from 72 national-level traditional villages in the Hehuang Region, China. Building on a typology of ethnic inter-embedding comprising Clustered-Isolation, Boundary-Permeation, and Cellular-Symbiosis contexts, we compiled 82 spatial records of major religious buildings. Standardized distances were calculated from each religious building to the mean center of the built-up area, the built-up-area boundary, and the main street. Relative inter-building distances were also examined for different religious buildings in Cellular-Symbiosis villages. Differences among contexts were assessed using the Kruskal–Wallis H test and Dunn–Bonferroni post hoc comparisons. The results show significant differences in distances to the settlement center and main street across the three contexts, whereas distances to the built-up-area boundary do not differ significantly. Religious buildings in Clustered-Isolation villages are generally closer to both the built-up-area center and the main street, while those in Boundary-Permeation villages are relatively displaced from internal core spaces. The strongest between-group difference is observed for main-street distance (H = 17.08, p < 0.001, ε2 = 0.215). A subsample analysis of Tibetan Buddhist-related buildings yields a similar significant difference in main-street distance (H = 10.51, p = 0.005, ε2 = 0.161), suggesting that the overall pattern is not fully attributable to variation in religious-building composition. In Cellular-Symbiosis villages, nine valid building pairs show substantial heterogeneity in standardized inter-building distance, ranging from 0.1557 to 1.5611, and include both closely juxtaposed and spatially separated multi-nodal configurations. These findings indicate that religious spatial configurations should not be interpreted solely through a center–periphery framework. Sustainable planning should consider the relationships of religious buildings with street networks, residential clusters, topographic interfaces, public facilities, and other religious nodes. The study provides a transparent and reproducible multiscalar framework to support context-sensitive spatial planning and cultural landscape conservation in multiethnic traditional villages.