Does New-Type Urbanization Correct the Imbalance Between Urbanization and Environmental Quality? Evidence from Satellite-Derived Data in China
Rapid urbanization has generated substantial economic growth but has also intensified pressure on the environment. China’s New-Type Urbanization Policy (NTU) was designed to promote people-centered, smart governance, and green development. However, whether the NTU policy has improved the coordination between urbanization and environmental quality remains insufficiently examined. Using panel data in China from 2010 to 2021, this study constructs an urbanization–environment coupling coordination degree index based on satellite-derived China’s High-resolution Eco-Environmental Quality dataset and applies a continuous difference-in-differences model to evaluate the impact of NTU policy intensity. The results show that greater NTU policy intensity is associated with significant improvements in urbanization–environment coordination after controlling for pre-existing socioeconomic, ecological, and geographical differences across cities. This finding is consistent with a corrective effect: rather than simply expanding urban scale, NTU appears to help offset the misalignment between urban development and environmental quality. Conditional analyses further suggest that the estimated policy effect is more readily observed where industrial structures are more advanced and local attention to ecological governance is stronger, indicating that these conditions shape the extent to which NTU can be translated into coordination gains. Heterogeneity analyses show that the estimates are statistically more robust in eastern, coastal, and non-resource-based cities, while the comparison across green-coverage groups remains inconclusive because the low-coverage group has a larger but less precisely estimated coefficient. Overall, the findings suggest that NTU has corrective potential, but that its effect is conditional rather than uniform across cities and depends on local governance, industrial, and ecological circumstances.