LAUSR

The multi planning contradictions and maladjustment of spatial management that evolved from an unbalanced development are becoming increasingly serious in China; therefore, it is imperative to know how to coordinate spatial planning. The scientific division of spatial unit attributes and the identification of ecological–agricultural production–living spaces (EPLs) have become the key scientific problems of this period. The existing urban structure zoning model, the urban growth boundary model, and the function-oriented zoning model show three main shortcomings: the difficult data acquisition and the large limitation of the application because of their high requirements of the related parameters, strong subjective weight setting, and lack of comprehensive zoning in the EPLs practice. This paper builds a quantitative and easily operated model for the spatial zoning of municipal administrative areas (MAA) based on the existing spatial equilibrium model for regional development. Three representative cities in China were modeled empirically with this model and the results were compared with those obtained by the existing models. We investigated the image consistency of this model to the three existing models where the Kappa values were 85.9%, 88.2%, and 85.2%, respectively, with an average of 86.4%. This showed that the model could reduce the data limitation and expand the scope of the application while ensuring the accuracy of the model’s analysis results. Meanwhile, the EPLs zoning was clearer, which made the spatial plan coordination more efficient and scientific. Overall, this model could not only solve the problem of the EPLs zoning and spatial plan coordination in MAA, but also guide urban land use planning from two dimensions of space and time and effectively promote the coordination and sustainable development of spatial planning.