Planning Of Slow-Traveling Facility System For The Ancient Great Wall Cultural Heritage Corridor In Datong, Shanxi Province

The Great Wall is a world cultural heritage and a treasure of human civilization. In 2017, the Government of Datong, Shanxi Province proposed to build a cultural heritage corridor of the ancient Great Wall. Based on deep investigation and meticulous analyses, the planning team envisioned a heritage corridor with a length of 258 km, covering a total area of 186 km(2), in which the slow-traveling facility system, as an important component that integrates the construction, operation, and management of related heritage sites, provides sightseeing, recreational, and educational services. This article discusses the strategies to develop the slow-traveling facility system in the cultural heritage corridor, which adopts a low-interference structure according to the spatial distribution of heritage sites along the Great Wall, and applies the minimum cumulative resistance model and other scientific methods to analyze development suitability and ecological environment conditions of the project site. Based on the evaluation results, the slow-traveling facility system and the service node system are adaptively planned and designed, combined with a low-intervention interpretation system. Finally, the scales of facilities are designed based on an estimation of tourist amount to control the impact of construction on heritage sites and natural environment. As such, the balance between heritage conservation and tourism development is achieved.