Urban Agglomerations Promote the Coordinated Development of Urbanization and Intensive Land Use

As a geographical development mode, can urban agglomeration solve the problem of intensive land use that cannot be solved on the urban scale? What is the degree of balanced development between urbanization and intensive land use? This study constructs the index system of the coupling system between urbanization development and intensive land use, and evaluates the urbanization development subsystem and the intensive land use subsystem using the coupling Comprehensive Gravity–Gram–Schmidt Orthogonalization model (CG-GSO) and the entropy weight method, based on the coupling coordination degree model to explore coordinated development, and, finally, it analyzes the driving factors. The results showed the following: (1) the urbanization development and the intensive land use subsystems were rising in the two urban agglomerations; (2) in the coupling system, the driving factors were the economic development and the land input level dimensions in the Jing-Jin-Ji urban agglomeration, and the economic development and the land output level dimensions in the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration; and (3) the Jing-Jin-Ji urban agglomeration was always in the land input stage, while the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration had experienced the land utilization stage, the land input stage and the land output stage. In general, urban agglomeration, as a development mode, had indeed solved the imbalance in the coupling system. Although the coordination degree was unbalanced from 2003 to 2020, it increased and had a strong development momentum, approaching the balanced development (the Jing-Jin-JI urban agglomeration was 0.3493 and the Yangtze River Delta was 0.3611) in 2020, and achieving slightly balanced development in 2023, with barely balanced development in 2034 and superiorly balanced development in 2043 (Jing-Jin-Jin urban agglomeration) and in 2044 (Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration). The research provides ideas for other countries to solve the uncoordinated development between urbanization and intensive land use.