Abstract: Resource-based city’s urbanization and the ecological risk of land utilization are the important factor that affects the transformation development of resource-based city.This paper takes 126 national prefecture-level resource-based cities as the research object, adopts the population proportion method, comprehensive evaluation method and coupling model to study the resource-based city urbanization, the ecological risk of land utilization in the process of urbanization and their inner relationship.The results show that the urbanization of resource-based cities develops rapidly.The urbanization level of northeast China has always kept staying ahead, while the urbanization of resource-based cities in eastern China has the largest growth rate and the urbanization level of different regions is unbalanced since 1978.From 1980 to 2015, the ecological risk index of land use showed a downward trend in 87.3% resource-based prefecture-level cities and 12.7% are with upward trend.In terms of time sequence, the interaction between the urbanization system of resource-based cities and the ecological risk system of land use is enhanced.Spatially, there is no significant change in the interaction relationship between the two in northeast region in China, while the interaction relationship between the urbanization system of resource-based cities and the land use ecological risk system in east region of China, central region of China and west region in China are significantly enhanced, while the sustainability of resource-based cities is weakened.