For a long time, economists have generally believed that “the key to solving rural issues lies in urban areas”. However, the discussion regarding which type of urban-rural spatial structure benefits rural development remains insufficiently explored.

This paper leverages high-precision satellite data to identify the population distribution and land use types within village-level administrative units, exploring how the distance from villages to cities affects rural population growth and construction land expansion. Innovatively, it introduces the concept of incremental distance to assess which urban-rural spatial structure most effectively fosters rural development.

The study finds that, on average, rural areas closer to cities experience more significant increases in population and construction land, although this effect decreases as city size increases, with very large cities potentially hindering rural population growth.

Moreover, the study highlights the significant role of numerous small cities in rural development and suggests that a hierarchically organized urban-rural spatial structure more effectively stimulates rural areas. A regional comparison reveals that the urban-rural spatial structure in the south enhances rural development more effectively than in the north, where rural areas face more severe challenges of population outflow and land expansion.

The contributions of this paper are that: It constructs a micro dataset at the rural level based on satellite data, providing a reference for other rural studies and mitigating the lack of rural micro data; it integrates population growth and construction land expansion into the analysis framework, exploring the impact of distance from urban centers on rural development from a spatial mismatch perspective; it introduces incremental distance analysis to examine the impact of urban-rural spatial structure on rural development, identifying a cleaner effect.