Objective The “mountain − city” overlooking landscape is an organic whole formed by the long-term interaction between traditional city construction thoughts and local landscape environment, which contains both urban cultural characteristics and human settlement wisdom. The control of the “mountain − city” overlooking landscape meets the overall requirements of the new period of territorial spatial planning for the development of landscape environment protection, and can provide the basic logic for the control of urban construction, while the control of building height is an important lever and policy tool to show the characteristics of the “mountain − city” relationship. Therefore, in combination with the project practice of the Guidelines for the Protection and Use of Qingyuan Mountain and the Coordination of Regional Construction Control, and on the basis of traditional research on building height control, this research takes the “mountain − city” overlooking as the logical starting point and planning reference to explore the construction scheme and application technology of the building height control model based on the combination of rigidity and elasticity, with the aim of enhancing the globality and pertinence of urban spatial control, and improving the overall control of urban space, while providing methodological guidance and case study for the construction practice of similar cities.

Methods Taking Qingyuan Mountain Area in Quanzhou as an example, this research firstly makes an overview of the landscape and humanity pattern of the urban area, the changes of the urban and landscape environment, and the problems currently faced by the city, and analyzes the spatial characteristics and current status of cityscape control in Quanzhou. Secondly, through the literature research method, the research lists the methods and case practices of building height control, so as to construct a building height control system based on the “mountain − city” overlooking in combination with the characteristics of Qingyuan Mountain Area in Quanzhou. Thirdly, when constructing a holistic “mountain − city” overlooking system in Qingyuan Mountain Area, this research uses the GIS view analysis method to analyze the view of multiple viewpoints, so as to determine the landscape viewing corridor, and uses the deep learning pattern recognition method to analyze the perception of mountain in Qingyuan Mountain Area, so as to select the landscape viewpoints in the urban public space. In the overall mountain − city relationship, AHP hierarchical analysis and GIS spatial superposition analysis are used to select multi-factor variables to measure the capacity of urban development, which is then translated into a benchmark model for height control based on a reasonable threshold; in the specific landscape and humanity elements, the building height control strategy is centred on the two perspectives of “mountain overlooking from the city” and “city overlooking from the mountain”. Based on the line-of-sight protection of natural landscape corridors and humanity landmarks, the GIS skyline analysis tool is used to calculate the elevation values of the places within the limiting surfaces, and the baseline model is corrected by quantitative data, in order to determine quantitative indicators for building height control in Qingyuan Mountain Area.

Results The results show that the correction strategy based on the “mountain−city” overlooking system can effectively correct the distribution of building height under the perspective of single development capacity, and the control strategy plays a certain role in controlling building height in the ancient urban area, the built-up area and the mountain area of Quanzhou. The control results should also be considered to ensure the legal benefits of relevant control regulations. Additionally, the building height model should follow the principle of combining rigidity and elasticity, the control requirements of grading and classification should be refined, and corresponding control conditions should be put forward, so as to improve relevant indicators of building height in the control regulations.

Conclusion With the help of relevant spatial analysis technology models and methods, this research improves the global and systematic building height control in the overall relationship of “mountain − city” overlooking and then refines the pertinence and differentiation of the control over different areas by the overlooking system in the element guidance of grading, classification and zoning. The urban building height benchmark model and its correction strategy are constructed from the two levels of overall relationship and local elements, and then applied to the practice of local building height control, which is also of great significance for other coastal mountain cities similar to Quanzhou to break through spatial governance dilemmas. At the same time, the building height control model constructed in this research needs to be constantly tested and revised in more urban height control practices, and future research needs to be optimized and improved in terms of the immediacy of data and the multi-sample comparative analysis.