Assessment on the Urbanization Quality of China’s Main Grain-Producing Areas under the SDGs

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by the United Nations in 2015 guide the important direction of high-quality urbanization in China’s main grain-producing areas (MGPAs), and improving the quality of urbanization is also crucial to achieve the SDGs. China’s MGPAs not only undertake the task of promoting urbanization but also of ensuring food security. The establishment of an index system based on SDGs can more effectively measure the urbanization quality of MGPAs. For the specific targets of the SDGs, this study established two sets of multidimensional indicator systems, whether including the goals of food and agriculture, and tracked the progress toward improving urbanization quality of China’s MGPAs, including 128 prefecture-level cities, during 2010–2018. We found that the comprehensive urbanization quality and the index of economic efficiency, urbanization level, and environmental quality showed an upward trend with significant regional differences and spatial agglomeration distributions, but the level of agricultural development and urban–rural co-ordination have declined in recent years; the ranking and distribution of urbanization quality, including agricultural development, varied significantly, and the number of cities belonging to the good co-ordination mode decreased as some cities changed to a lower level; and urbanization that does not sacrifice the agricultural capabilities of MGPAs could improve urbanization quality and implement the SDGs.