Understanding the role of land attachment in the emergence of hollow villages based on the agent-based complex system framework

Rural hollowing, associated with depopulation and cropland abandonment, is a pressing issue under the rapid pace of urbanization. Understanding the emergence of hollowed villages with the abandonment of homestead and cropland is a major objective of halting the waste use of land resources and improving rural social welfare. Here, we apply the agent-based complex system framework to explore the dynamics of rural land systems, focusing on the feedback effects of cropland abandonment and labor migration decisions that are characteristics of the hollowing process. We applied a spatially explicit agent-based model in two study areas in rural China and designed scenarios where farmers treat their cropland parcels and homesteads with and without land attachment. Experimental results show that return-migration plays a more critical role than out-migration in shaping system dynamics and preventing the emergence of hollowed villages when there is strong land attachment. The rate of cropland reclamation following the return-migration outweighs the rate of cropland abandonment, which provide negative feedback to the out-migration decision and subsequently decelerate the process of rural hollowing. Hollowed villages are a manifestation of social-ecological outcomes resulting from human-land interactions with migration trajectories and land use patterns exhibiting nonlinearity, divergence, and even unexpected changes. Our findings highlight the critical need of considering the endogenous feedback effects for policymaking. Policy that aims at rural development and land consolidation should integrate tools helping return-migrants with improved land-use efficiency in addition to rural revitalization.