Intensive Land Use and New Urbanization Measurement and Coupling Coordination —— A Case Study of 31 Provinces (Cities or Regions) in Mainland China

From the perspectives of ecology, population, economy and society, this paper established an intensive land use system. From the aspects of land input, output and sustainable development, it built a new urbanization system. Besides, using the entropy weighting method, it measured the level of intensive land use and new urbanization of 31 provinces (cities or regions). Based on the coupling degree and coordinated development model, and in combination with GIS, it discussed the spatial differentiation pattern. It reached the following research results, (i) The new urbanization in the eastern region is ahead of the intensive land use, and they are relatively balanced in the western region; the new urbanization in the central and northeast regions lags behind the intensive land use; the intensive land use and the development of new urbanization in the eastern region are both stronger than that in central region, while the northeastern and western regions are weaker. (ii) The effect of sustainable land use in mainland China is remarkable, and the potential advantage of land output benefit in the eastern region is huge, the land input and sustainable development in the central region rank second, and the land output in the western region is the weakest. (iii) The development of new urbanization in mainland China is concentrated on economic and social urbanization; the eastern region has high economic urbanization benefits, while the western region is weak in both the ecological and population urbanization. (iv) There is significant unbalance of the spatial differentiation pattern in the intensive land use and new urbanization, showing a trend of high in east and low in west. (v) Most provinces (cities or regions) stay at a high level of antagonistic coupling, but there are “virtual high-level coupling” in regions such as Ningxia and Gansu; at present, the eastern, central and northeastern are moderately disordered, the western is highly disordered, and most provinces (cities or regions) are moderately disordered. Regions with high coordination level are concentrated in the eastern part of Guangdong and Jiangsu, Shandong, Shanghai, Henan, and Hebei; the coordination level of western regions such as Xinjiang, Gansu, Qinghai, Ningxia, Tibet, Guizhou and Yunnan badly needs to be upgraded.