Urban Modern Agriculture Development in Major Chinese Cities: A Multidimensional Evaluation and Contextual Typology

Urban agriculture (UA) is a vital component of sustainable urban development. In China, however, it is more closely associated with policy-oriented urban modern agriculture (UMA), which integrates peri-urban production, agricultural modernization, multifunctional development, and urban–rural governance. Nevertheless, few researchers have conducted systematic cross-city evaluations of UMA development, especially in rapidly urbanizing national contexts. To address this research gap, we have developed a multidimensional evaluation framework to assess the level of UMA development across 36 large- and medium-sized cities in China during 2019–2023. The indicator system covers five dimensions: production capability, industrial integration, agricultural ecological sustainability, factor agglomeration, and operational modernization. A composite evaluation model combining objective weighting with expert-adjusted subjective weighting is applied to compute city-level performance scores. In addition, Ward’s hierarchical clustering method is utilized to identify distinct contextual city typologies. According to our findings, UMA development exhibits a relatively stable hierarchical structure. A handful of leading cities maintain clear advantages, but the majority remain concentrated in the middle and lower tiers with limited upward mobility. Alterations in city rankings predominantly occur among cities of comparable performance. Ward clustering of contextual indicators identifies four contextual city types related to UMA development: balanced development cities, economically efficient cities, resource-constrained cities, and agricultural-potential cities. These categories reflect differences in socioeconomic development, resource carrying capacity, and environmental capacity, and therefore help to interpret the constraints and feasible policy directions that inform UMA performance. Overall, our proposed framework proves to be a practical tool for benchmarking UMA development and informing differentiated policy design across city types.