Coupling Coordination and Interactive Response Between Urban–Rural Integrated Development and Multifunctional Cultivated Land

Balancing urban–rural integrated development (URID) and multifunctional cultivated land (MCL) is crucial to regional sustainable development. However, existing studies mostly focus on the unidirectional impact of urbanization on cultivated land, while the interactive effects between URID and MCL are underestimated. Panel data for 284 Chinese cities at or above the prefecture level from 2000 to 2020 are used. A comprehensive evaluation model, a coupling coordination degree model, and a panel vector autoregression (PVAR) model are combined to examine the coupling coordination level and dynamic interactive response between URID and MCL. China’s URID level rose steadily, and the urban–rural dual structure gradually weakened, while MCL became more diversified. The coupling coordination degree between URID and MCL improved continuously, with an overall east-high, west-low spatial pattern. Coordination types shifted frombeing on the verge of imbalance and barely coordinated to primary coordination and moderate coordination; specifically, the proportion of barely coordinated cities dropped from 67.61% to 22.18%, while primarily coordinated cities surged from 17.61% to 63.73% between 2000 and 2020. Regional disparities remained significant, and low-coordination areas were concentrated in the west. The interaction between the two systems was asymmetric. Variance decomposition indicates that URID explains 17.623% of the variation in MCL, whereas MCL only explains 5.867% of URID. The impulse response of MCL to a URID shock was stronger and converged more slowly (period 9), whereas the reverse promoting effect of MCL on URID was relatively weak and converged faster (period 7). This pattern indicates a long-term relationship in which URID evolved actively while MCL adapted passively. Based on these core findings, we recommend implementing region-specific policies to address spatial disparities, establishing a two-way feedback mechanism to enhance the value realization of MCL, and designing adaptive policy tools with cross-period evaluations to overcome the temporal lag in their interaction.