Unlocking the relationship between regional integration and urban green development efficiency (UGDE) is of great importance for boosting regional high-quality development and promoting sustainable urban development patterns. Although studies have analyzed the spatio-temporal evolution and influencing factors of regional integration and UGDE, the impact of regional integration on UGDE remains untested. In this paper, we construct a conceptual framework to analyze how regional integration can influence UGDE through promoting the factors mobility and optimizing the industrial layout. In addition, we further choose the urban agglomeration in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River (UAMRYR), a rapidly growing urban agglomeration in central China, as a case to investigate the spatial spillover effect of regional integration on UGDE from 2003 to 2017. We quantify the UGDE with a random forest model, then estimate the underlying determinants of the UGDE with a spatial Durbin model. Results indicated that (1) the regional integration level and the UGDE index of the UAMRYR and its three sub-urban agglomerations show an increasing trend; (2) for every 1% increase in the level of regional integration, the level of UGDE will increase by 0.8307%; (3) the impact of regional integration on UGDE has obvious regional heterogeneity; while playing a promoting effect in the Wuhan urban agglomeration and the Changsha-Zhuzhou-Xiangtan urban agglomeration, it shows an inhibitory effect in the Poyang Lake urban agglomeration. We conclude that regional integration in agglomeration areas can accelerate the factors flow and optimize the industrial layout for improving UGDE.

To achieve sustainable development, the improvement of villagers’ subjective well-being has become the main policy goal of urban village renewal. However, the mechanism of how urban village renewal affects subjective well-being remains untested in previous research. Utilizing the survey data on 414 resettled households in the urban village renewal through a random sample method in Wuhan, China, we adopted the intermediary model to test the mechanism of how urban village renewal affects the resettled villagers’ subjective well-being. We explored the contribution rate of each intermediary variable to subjective well-being through Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition and, consequently, proposed corresponding policy suggestions. The results show that the renewal of urban villages can improve the economic conditions, housing conditions, social security status, and living environments of residents and significantly enhance the subjective well-being of the resettled villagers and households. The multi-dimensional changes resulting from the renewal of urban villages increase subjective well-being through complete mediation. The Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition results demonstrate that improvement of the living environment has the strongest influence on subjective well-being, with a contribution rate of 69.81%. In the future, the renewal of urban villages should focus on environmental improvement, protect neighborhood networks, and promote community engagement, so as to realize the sustainable redevelopment of urban villages.

The characteristic town (CT, or Te Se Xiao Zhen in Chinese) program is among the most important drivers of China’s new urbanization. However, the program aroused countrywide concerns about its rapid elevation, excessive real estate construction, high investment risk, and severe construction homogenization. Despite the policy’s rapid dissemination, there needs to be a theoretical basis and practical guidance for the local government to evaluate CT candidates to ensure the feasibility and sustainability of this novel urbanization practice. Moreover, simply employing traditional evaluation techniques, such as TOPSIS or analytical hierarchical process, may overwhelmingly stress inherited advantages of existing towns and easily overlook the potential candidates in the policy’s early implementation. Thus, the current study employs a novel advantage-oriented competitive evaluation (ACE) approach, which values the comparative advantages of the evaluated objects, to rate the performance of fifteen information technology characteristic towns (ITCTs) comprehensively. The presented work constructs a three-level performance index system based on public statistics, comprehensively evaluates the ITCTs’ performance, and reveals each CT’s unique advantages. The analysis and discussion disclose the evaluated ITCTs’ development status, highlighting the blooming development against public concerns and the ITCTs’ clustering based on unique comparative advantages. The evaluation results also verify that the ACE is an excellent comprehensive evaluation approach that can reveal an object’s comparative advantages from varying facets and depths. Finally, this work briefly concludes the emerging issues of ITCTs’ construction, the limitations of ACE evaluation, and suggestions for future research.

Heterogeneous land development opportunities induced by spatial regulation produce different advantages in areas, which undoubtedly differentiates farmers’ employment. The aim of this study was to quantitatively examine its impact. We selected Moshui Lake City Park (urban development planning area), Sino-French Eco-City (industrial development planning area), and Chenhu International Wetland (ecological protection planning area) as its principal research areas. These regions are all located in Wuhan city, Hubei province, China. After obtaining 907 valid responses from rural households, the Tobit model was adopted to identify the impact of land development opportunities on farmers’ nonfarm employment. The results show that, first, industrial development opportunity (IDO) and urban development opportunity (UDO) provide more job security than the reference group, which is ecological development opportunity (EDO), with the estimated coefficients of IDO and UDO being 0.325 and 0.944, respectively. However, a negative correlation was found between UDO and farmers’ employment selection and income. Second, heterogeneity analysis reveals that the promotion effect of land development opportunities on farmers’ employment is more significant for low- and middle-income, low-quantity, and high-quality households. Finally, further analysis shows that IDO can promote employment for all age groups, but UDO inhibits the elderly labor force from getting employed. These findings provide evidence-based insights which can enable the government to formulate land value-added distribution systems that promote balanced development between regions and stakeholders.

Spatial mismatches between ecosystem services and human demands pose critical challenges for sustainable land use in ecologically fragile regions. Rapid urbanization intensifies land-use conflicts in ecologically fragile regions, threatening ecosystem services and habitat sustainability. This study addresses this challenge by quantifying spatial mismatches between landscape resource functions (LRFs: natural, traditional, and humanistic) and service demands (LSFs, e.g., catering and public facilities) in Xinxian County, in China’s Dabie Mountains, using multi-source data (DEM, POI big data, and remote sensing) and spatial analysis (nearest neighbor indices, kernel density, and multi-ring buffers). The results reveal that concentrated natural LRFs in high-elevation single-core clusters exhibit low dispersion, thus increasing vulnerability to land conversion, while agglomerated LSFs in urban cores exacerbate ecosystem service inequalities. Crucially, service deficits beyond 3 km buffers and the fragmentation of traditional agricultural zones indicate potential erosion of regulating services, as inferred from spatial mismatches (e.g., soil retention and water regulation), and cultural resilience. These spatial mismatches act as proxies for habitat risks, in which humanistic landscape expansion competes with ecological corridors, amplifying fragmentation. To mitigate risks, we propose (1) enhancing connectivity for natural resource corridors to stabilize regulating services, (2) reallocating LSFs to peri-urban buffers to reduce pressure on critical habitats, and (3) integrating ecosystem service trade-offs into landscape planning. This framework provides an actionable pathway for balancing development and habitat conservation in mountainous regions undergoing land-use transitions.