The fragmentation of resources, ecological imbalance, and the disintegration of essential factors in modern urban–rural development have become core bottlenecks constraining the achievement of global sustainable development goals. Existing research often focuses on static analysis or single-dimensional exploration, making it difficult to fully reveal the evolutionary patterns of urban–rural sustainable development systems and the core mechanisms of digital empowerment. This study adopts ecological wisdom as a theoretical perspective, introduces system dynamics methods, and constructs a three-dimensional linkage system simulation model of digital technology, factor circulation, and ecological wisdom capital. Based on model simulation data, a 70-year long-cycle simulation is conducted to explore the leverage effect of digital technology and the self-organizing evolutionary mechanisms of the system. The findings are as follows: First, the transformation of urban–rural sustainable development from fragmentation to synergy is essentially a self-organizing phase transition process. Within the system, digital technology, factor circulation, and ecological wisdom capital form a mutually beneficial symbiotic relationship through positive feedback mechanisms, driving the system toward higher-order evolution. Second, key variables such as community participation, urban–rural ecological resilience, and development pressure exhibit significant threshold effects. Only when the investment scale and institutional guarantees for these variables reach critical values can the system’s path dependence be broken, significantly driving synergistic transformation. Third, as an exogenous lever, digital technology can break down barriers to factor segmentation, reduce energy loss during system transformation, and achieve systematic integration of urban–rural resources, public services, and ecological capital with lightweight investment, serving as the core breakthrough for promoting synergistic transformation. This study integrates ecological wisdom and digital technology into the system dynamics analysis framework of urban–rural synergistic transformation, clarifies the dynamic transmission pathways of digital technology empowering urban–rural synergy, overcomes the limitations of traditional static research, enriches the cross-disciplinary application of ecological wisdom and system dynamics in the field of urban–rural development, and provides a scientific policy basis for the mutual construction of the digital economy, ecological protection, and urban–rural integration.
Wu et al. (Sun,) studied this question.