<p>As the development of urbanization in China enters the middle and late stages, improving the quality of human settlements has become a social concern. Promoting urban ecological environment management and building cities that are pleasant to live, work, and visit has become a new requirement for urban space quality improvement. ‘Spatial genes’ refer to unique and relatively stable spatial combination patterns formed by long-term interaction between urban space, natural environment, and history-culture, carrying region-specific information (Jin et al. Urban Planning 43:14–21, 2019). Located in the Western Hunan Tujia and Miao Autonomous Prefecture of Hunan Province, Fenghuang Ancient Town is a national historical and cultural city with a long history and deep cultural heritage, and it is a well-known tourist-type historical and cultural city in China; its geographic features, humanistic values, and characteristic architecture all have irreplaceable research value. In this paper, Fenghuang Ancient Town is selected as the research object, based on the spatial gene theory, through the collation and analysis of the network evaluation text of social media, the relationship between tourists and spatial gene influencing factors in the urban space is dissected, and spatial genes are identified, extracted, and classified to explore the tourists’ satisfaction evaluation of Fenghuang Ancient Town. At the same time, spatial analysis and spatial reconstruction are carried out using spatial syntax from the perspectives of geography and spatial layout, to promote the spatial upgrading and transformation of the urban environment through the re-modelling of the spatial genes of Fenghuang Ancient Town, and to provide decision-making guidance for the future urban development of Fenghuang Ancient Town.</p>