The high-quality development of urbanization is strategically important for the sustainable economic and social development in the Yellow River Basin. It is necessary to establish a system of indicators to evaluate the high-quality development in terms of five aspects: innovation, coordination, green, openness and sharing. Spatial autocorrelation, local Moran indices and cluster analysis are used to study the spatial–temporal distribution of high-quality urbanization development in each province. The results indicate that the urbanization level of nine provinces in the Yellow River Basin showed an increasing trend from 2010 to 2018. However, the development of the five dimensions is not balanced. At the same time, the level of high-quality urbanization development in the Yellow River Basin has not shown significant spatial clustering characteristics and has not formed a good interactive relationship and aggregation effects. It is of great practical importance to promote the coordinated development of urbanization and the high quality of urbanization. The problems existing in the current development are found, and effective measures are proposed to make the urbanization development adapt to the economic and social development.