“Three-space” (including agricultural space, urban and rural construction space, and ecological space) and “three-line” (including urban development boundary, prime farmland control line, basic ecological control line) planning has been regarded as an essential measure for China’s city and county level “multiple-plan integration”. It handles the multiple planning objectives of development management, agricultural land preservation, and ecological resource protection. This article proposes a rational planning with multi-criteria evaluation and spatial optimization (RP-MCE-SOP) framework for China’s county-level “three-space” and “three-line” planning by following the rational planning (RP) model and taking advantages of multi-criteria evaluation (MCE) and spatial optimization (SOP) techniques. The framework includes five steps of building the SOP model, land suitability evaluation with MCE, optimization problem solving, post-processing of land allocation solutions, and applying post-processed solutions to “three-space” and “three-line” planning. The framework was implemented in Dongxihu District of Wuhan City with the Boolean aggregation and analytical hierarchy analysis (AHP) MCE techniques and the patch-based Non-dominated Genetic Algorithm (NSGA-II) SOP algorithm. The case study shows: (1) The framework is feasible and useful for assisting decision making in “three-space” and “three-line” planning. (2) The planning solutions protect ecologically sensitive spaces and high-quality agricultural land and plan future construction in the urban peripheral area or transportation convenient areas. (3) The solutions are useful for planning the hard boundaries for ecological resource protection and prime farmland preservation and setting both hard and soft boundaries for urban growth.

Currently, urban land use in China faces many challenges, such as irrational land use structure and inefficiency, which is especially obvious in resource-based cities. In order to improve this situation, this paper uses the super-efficient Slack-Based Measure (SBM) model to measure the green land use efficiency (GLUE) of 113 resource-based cities in China, analyzes its spatial-temporal evolution law, and identifies the formation law of heterogeneous GLUE in resource-based cities using the Tobit model. The research results show that: (1) GLUE in resource-based cities shows year-on-year growth and has certain stage characteristics, in which the eastern region is the best, followed by the western and central regions, and the northeastern region is the worst; regenerative cities are significantly better than mature, growth, and declining cities; oil and gas cities are better than non-metal, forest, metal, and coal cities in turn; (2) High-value resource-based cities are concentrated in the eastern and western regions, while low-value ones are concentrated in the central and northeastern regions. Moreover, the number of high-value resource-based cities is continuously increasing, while the number of low-value ones is significantly decreasing; (3) The level of economic development, industrial structure, level of technological input, number of green patents granted, government financial support, sewage treatment rate, and policy constraints all exhibit significant positive effects on the GLUE of resource-based cities. Furthermore, there is notable heterogeneity among resource-based cities in different regions, development stages, and resource types. In the future, policies should be implemented on a city-by-city basis, and a sound long-term mechanism for policy implementation should be established to enhance the long-term awareness of managers and land users so as to improve the GLUE in resource-based cities.