Measuring Urban–Rural Integration and Its Driving Mechanisms in the Chengdu–Chongqing Economic Circle

As urban agglomerations reshape China’s urban–rural relations, existing evaluations still focus mainly on development levels within administrative units, with limited attention to spatial interactions between urban and rural territorial systems. Taking the Chengdu–Chongqing Economic Circle (CCEC) as a case, this study develops a spatial interaction-based framework for measuring urban–rural integration. The framework integrates population, land and economic factors to characterize urban–rural development status, orientation, coordination and interaction intensity. The Geographical Detector is further employed to identify the driving mechanisms. Compared with conventional within-unit assessments, this framework captures the direction, intensity, and cross-regional dependence of urban–rural linkages, thereby providing a more relational understanding of urban–rural integration. The results show that the CCEC experienced a transition from factor differentiation toward functional restructuring, characterized by continued urban concentration of population and land factors and a relative balancing of economic factors between urban and rural areas. Urban–rural integration exhibited clear directional and spatial dependence: urban-to-rural interactions were mainly concentrated around the Chengdu–Chongqing dual cores and major development corridors, whereas rural-to-urban interactions formed a more dispersed support network. The driving mechanisms were not dominated by individual factors but emerged from the interaction of economic foundations, spatial conditions, policy environments and regional linkages, with different factors playing varying roles across development stages. This study provides new insights into the evolution mechanisms of urban–rural integration in emerging urban agglomerations characterized by strong core–periphery disparities, highlighting the importance of spatial interactions, policy guidance and regional development conditions.