As the world’s largest sunrise industry based on its comprehensive effects in the industry, employment, ecological, cultural, and other aspects, tourism has become a new growth point of new urbanization development. The upgrade of tourism industry not only increases the demand, but also leads tourism space to expand, and many small towns are gradually being discovered and developed, forming a distinctive tourist destination. It has become the current subject we face how to develop different types of tourism towns scientifically and rationally, build a reasonable resources evaluation system, explore tourism industry development model of small towns, optimize the space environment of tourism towns. However, due to the lack of scientific theoretical guidance, disorderly development and the same model among thousands of towns, many sorts of practical problems appear such as deterioration of the ecological environment, decreasing of traditional rural culture and native landscape, and the loss of community residents’ right to speak. By summarizing the existing literature, we found a large number of domestic research focused on the exploration research and case studies ones, but universal research is relatively weak. There are multiple views in the concept, type, sort, resources combing, and the selection of region development model, which includes a certain bias. Based on the scientific definition of tourism towns, this article has combed a classification criteria of tourism towns, established a new classification method based on the core attraction(A)-Town(T)-Rural(R); through which the tourism towns can be divided into four categories : integration of A and T, separation of A and T, linkages of "A+T+R" and recreation of "A+T+R". This article proposed 8 main categories, 33 sub-categories, 144 subcategories of small towns with two-factor classification of tourism resources evaluation system based on the whole realm of creative resources viewpoint. Based on the actual need of tourism towns development, combined with different combinations of three types of initial conditions, i. e. "attraction, urban infrastructure, environmental background", we can define the six major development model of tourism towns to provide reference and basis for in-depth study of tourism towns, and promote the healthy development of tourism towns".
