Urban land use conflict, green innovation and sustainable productivity: evidence from urban agglomerations in the Yangtze River Basin, China

As China's urbanization accelerates, the ongoing expansion of cities has exacerbated tight land resource constraints and the reduction of ecological space. Under these conditions, conventional extensive modes of development are unable to simultaneously accommodate economic growth, resource efficiency, and environmental carrying capacity, thus impeding the further development of urban sustainable productivity (USP). Drawing on resource scarcity theory and spatial equilibrium theory, this paper develops a theoretical analytical framework of “urban land use conflict (ULUC)–green innovation (GI)–USP”. Taking the urban agglomeration in the Yangtze River Basin (YRB) as a case study, this paper employs fixed effects models and mediation effect tests, and other empirical techniques, to investigate the mechanisms through which ULUC influences USP. These results show that: (1) ULUC exerts a significant positive impact on USP, and this effect exhibits marked variation across different sections of the YRB. (2) GI plays a mediating role in the relationship between ULUC and USP, while fiscal environmental expenditure (FEE) and green finance support (GFS) enhance this influence through moderating mechanisms. (3) Industrial structure upgrading displays a clear threshold effect, whereby the impact of ULUC on USP is significantly reinforced only when the urban industrial structure has reached a certain level of development. Against the backdrop of increasingly binding land resource constraints, cities are suggested to enhance their GI capacity, increase investment in environmental policy implementation, and promote industrial structure upgrading so as to advance USP.