A novel framework to evaluate urban-rural coordinated development: A case study in Shanxi Province, China

The coexistences of urban diseases and rural decline threaten the achievements of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). China, experiencing rapid urbanization recently, is facing the prominent issues of unbalanced and inadequate development. Accordingly, the Chinese government has launched new-type urbanization (NU) and rural vitalization (RV) strategies. After illustrating the coupling mechanism of NU and RV strategies, a novel framework that combines a multidimensional development index (MDI) and the modified coupling degree model (MCDM) is proposed to delineate urban-rural coordinated development. Taking Shanxi Province as an example, multi-source data are incorporated into NU and RV evaluation subsystems. MDI is introduced to evaluate the comprehensive performance of NU and RV, which overcomes the restriction of ordinary linear weighting method that assumes the independence of elements. MCDM is developed to estimate coordinated relationships of urban and rural development. Results show that only two cities are in the extreme coupling stage according to MCDM, which demonstrates it can effectively differentiate the degree of urban-rural integration, whereas the original model potentially overestimates the coupling degree. The effectiveness of the framework is validated in our empirical analysis, which can be applied to evaluate the performance and coordination among multiple subsystems in other fields.