Spatio-Temporal Evolution and Drivers of High-Quality Utilization of Urban Land in Chinese Cities

High-quality utilization of urban land (HUUL) is essential for optimizing urban land use and promoting high-quality development. Previous research has mainly focused on examining urban land use efficiency, neglecting the connection between urban land use and high-quality development. This study reveals the intrinsic association mechanism between high-quality development and urban land use, which can provide comprehensive theoretical and empirical support for high-quality land use and high-quality urban development. This study constructed an evaluation system for HUUL that comprehensively adopted the entropy method, kernel density estimation, and the geodetector model to analyze the spatio-temporal evolution and driving factors of the HUUL levels of 284 Chinese cities from 2006 to 2020. The measurement results showed that during 2006–2020, the HUUL level showed an apparent upward trend, and the eastern region > the central region > the overall region > the western region > the northeast region. From the kernel density map, there was a noticeable trend of varying degrees of increase in the difference of the main peak position of the HUUL level among cities in all regions except the west. Furthermore, some cities in the eastern and western regions had significantly higher HUUL levels than the others. According to the results of the factor analysis, it is evident that innovative use and open use are the internal primary factors that drive the enhancement of the HUUL level. Moreover, the level of economic development is the external primary factor that facilitates the improvement in HUUL level.