Characteristics of Urban–Rural Integration at the County-Scale Interface: The Case of Linqu County, China

Urban–rural integration (URI) has emerged as a crucial strategy to bridge urban and rural disparities and promote more sustained urbanisation paradigms in China and abroad. The urban–rural interface, where urban and rural spaces and daily activities are closely intertwined, reflects the complex and evolving dynamics of this integration, serves as a focal point for studying URI, and requires unique considerations in spatial planning. This study focuses on the scale of the county level and the basic spatial units for spatial planning practice in China to examine different types of urban–rural interfaces and their URI dynamics at a county level. By taking Linqu County as a case study region, land use data from Landsat remote sensing datasets were collected every 5 years from 2000 to 2020 to support the analysis of changes in the urban–rural interface. Three dimensions of land mixed-use features were employed, including the area and density, edge and shape, and aggregation and dispersion of the construction land in the region. When combined with the proportion of rural land use, the urban–rural interfaces were identified using the entropy method. This study then employed spatial analysis, the standard deviation ellipse method, and spatial autocorrelation to recognise URI dynamics, and three driving forces were identified and further analysed to support suggestions for county-level spatial planning. This research empirically enriches the understanding of the urban–rural interfaces and URI dynamics of Linqu, China. The methods and suggestions derived from the empirical study can offer potential solutions to promote URI in China and enhance urban–rural linkage in the global context to reach more sustained development.