Abstract: Scientific understanding of urban-rural settlement evolution and rules of coal resource-based city is a crucial part in implementing the strategy of coordinated development of urban and rural as well as promoting the sustainable development of resource-based city. This paper takes Huaibei City, Anhui Province, as an example to explore the urban-rural settlement evolution and coordinated development mode of coral resource-based city since 1990s, from the dimensions of settlement space, economic structure and social life. The methods of field study, remote sensing data and statistical data analysis were adopted. The main findings were as follows: （1) Urban construction land scale increased rapidly. There were significant spatial differences between changed areas. However, rural construction land scale increased slowly, and the spatial agglomeration degree was gradually improved. The urban-rural settlement evolution underwent three stages, including low-speed dispersion, mono-centric agglomeration and poly-centric cluster development stages. (2) Urban industry structure shifted from coal leading industry to a diversified and non-coalized orientation. Rural agricultural industrialization was greatly promoted. The proportion of nonfarm income was significantly increased. Besides, the economic ties between urban and rural areas were gradually strengthened. The economic structure experienced dual development, transformation development and diversified development stages. （3) The system of “small society” in mine was gradually collapsed due to the social space integration of “mine-urban”; The rural social network opened gradually, and the residential mode differentiated. Social life evolution of urban and rural areas underwent three stages, including “urban-mine-rural” segregation stage, largely increased population mobility stage and lifestyle integration stage. (4) Based on the analysis of socioeconomic development of typical rural towns, this study reached to a conclusion of three coordinated development modes of rural and urban according to the difference of development characteristics. These stages included mine-town (village) collaboration mode, mine (town) joint development mode and leading effect of center town mode. This study made attempts to provide reference for the “urban-mine-rural” transformation development of similar urban-rural types.