ABSTRACT While urban polycentric development reshapes regional spatial structure and significantly impacts cultivated land allocation and fragmentation, the underlying mechanisms are still poorly understood. Moreover, existing studies on the drivers of cultivated land fragmentation often overlook spatial effects, failing to accurately capture the spatial heterogeneity of predictive factors. To address these gaps, this study employed panel data from 217 Chinese cities (2002–2022) to quantify urban polycentricity and the cultivated land fragmentation index (CLFI). By comparing multiple predictive models and integrating SHAP and GeoShapley explainable AI (XAI) techniques, we analyzed the impact of polycentric development on CLFI. The results indicated that CLFI showed a fluctuating rise with significant spatial divergence. Polycentric development was the second‐largest driver, where Population concentration positively correlated with CLFI, while the Population of the largest center and Aggregated central area exhibited nonlinear negative correlations. Significant interaction effects were observed among these three variables, with Population concentration and the other two jointly suppressing CLFI. Furthermore, the effect of polycentric variables on CLFI displayed notable spatial heterogeneity. The driving effect of population concentration was stronger in the southeast and weaker in the northwest, whereas the suppression from the other two was concentrated in the North China and Northeast Plains. This study reveals the complex mechanisms through which polycentric structures affect cultivated land fragmentation from a macro‐spatial strategic perspective, offering critical insights for balancing urban growth and cultivated land protection, as well as policy insights for formulating differentiated polycentric development strategies for cities of different population sizes.
Wu et al. (Tue,) studied this question.