Towards a co-evolutionary framework of urban–rural integration: evidence from 44 global cases

Abstract Rapid urbanization has intensified the structural divide between urban and rural areas, making urban–rural integration (URI) a critical issue for sustainable territorial development. Existing URI research has generated valuable insights into factor flows, spatial coordination, and policy evaluation, but it remains largely concentrated in single-country contexts and is dominated by indicator-based measurement and fragmented case descriptions. As a result, current scholarship is more capable of assessing the degree of integration than explaining why URI occurs, who organizes it, and how it is sustained across different institutional settings. To address this gap, this study combines grounded theory with cross-case comparative analysis to examine 44 cases documented in the three volumes of UN-Habitat’s Compendium of Inspiring Practices on Urban–Rural Linkages. Through open and selective coding supported by NVivo, the study identifies recurring governance elements and synthesizes them into a generalizable analytical framework. The findings reveal a stable three-tier governance structure of URI, consisting of Core Principles, Action Entry Points, and Implementation Pathways. Three core principles provide the normative orientation for integration, while six action entry points and three implementation pathways explain how URI is operationalized in practice. Based on these findings, the paper proposes the Co-evolutionary Urban–Rural Linkages Mechanism (C-URLM), which shows that URI depends not only on factor mobility, but more fundamentally on governance arrangements, institutional coordination, and contextual adaptation. The results further suggest that URI should be understood not as a static policy outcome, but as a dynamic and iterative process shaped by context and outcome feedback. By shifting the analytical focus from outcome measurement to mechanism explanation, this study contributes a more generative approach to URI research. It offers both a transferable governance framework for cross-context comparison and a co-evolutionary perspective for understanding how urban–rural integration is organized, implemented, and sustained over time.