Uncovering the urban-rural integration of China over the past 40 years: Measurement framework and spatial-temporal evolution

Abstract

Alleviating the imbalance between urban and rural areas for regional coordinated development is an imperative response to the Sustainable Development Goal 10 of the United Nations. To track China’s urban-rural integration progress and address the uneven issues in specific fields, this study constructed a novel seven-dimension index system of urban-rural integration, comprising free population mobility, efficient land transfer, interactive economic growth, highly-linked transportation, equal public services, joint environmental governance and unimpeded informatization between urban and rural areas. Based on a comprehensive measurement framework and multi-source panel data, we uncovered the spatial-temporal evolution of urban-rural integration in China’s 367 prefecture-level administrative units from 1980 to 2022. The results demonstrated that China’s urban-rural integration steadily increased from 27.51 to 57.35 with an average annual growth rate of 3.40 %. Whereas, the overall urban-rural integration was relatively inferior in 2022, at the level of moderate integration whose proportion of China’s land area was 88.08 %. The urban-rural integration level in eastern region and urban agglomerations was higher than that in mid-west and non-urban agglomerations. From the perspective of seven dimensions, interactive economic growth, joint environmental governance and unimpeded informatization made an obvious improvement and reached higher integration, while free population mobility, efficient land transfer, highly-linked transportation and equal public services maintained the stage of moderate integration in 2022. In the future, China should make targeted efforts for urban-rural integration in terms of population, land use, transportation and public services, and accelerate urban-rural common prosperity in the mid-west and economically underdeveloped areas.

Keywords

Urban-rural integration / Measurement framework / Spatial-temporal evolution / Heterogeneity / China

Declaration of competing interests

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Chuanglin Fang: Writing – review & editing, Supervision, Project administration, Funding acquisition, Formal analysis, Conceptualization. Kewen Wang: Writing – review & editing, Writing – original draft, Methodology, Formal analysis, Data curation. Zehui Chen: Writing – review & editing, Methodology, Data curation. Zhitao Liu: Writing – review & editing, Methodology, Data curation. Menghang Liu: Writing – review & editing, Methodology, Data curation. Biao Sun: Writing – review & editing, Methodology, Data curation. Xia Liao: Writing – review & editing, Methodology, Data curation. Lingyu Meng: Writing – review & editing, Methodology, Data curation. Zhiying Yang: Writing – review & editing.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Innovative Research Group Project of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 42121001).

Supplementary materials

Supplementary material associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at doi:10.1016/j.geosus.2026.100424.

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