Abstract: Tourism, revered as an important means to promote urbanization, naturally has to seek for its optimal development path to push forward tourism urbanization in the context of the new development stage in conformity with the times. According to the characteristics of Zhangjiajie's tourism urbanization development, this paper constructs a system dynamics model of Zhangjiajie's tourism urbanization development from the three subsystems of industrial economy, social culture, and resource environment, based on which five modes of development paths are set up, namely the status quo continuation mode, economy-dominated mode, society-first mode, environmental-protection-based mode, and coordinated-development mode. The optimal development path is selected through the forecasting of the changing trend of key variables in the system and the evaluating of the level of tourism urbanization in Zhangjiajie from 2021 to 2030. The results show that:1 The development system of tourism urbanization is a complex dynamic process, and the representative variables of each subsystem have different trends during the simulation period; 2 Among the five paths, the coordinated development path has the best effect on improving the level of tourism urbanization, and the other four paths have more or less advantages and disadvantages in different degrees; (3) In the future, Zhangjiajie should follow the principle of "coordination first, all-round development in mind", and comprehensively implement measures such as cross-border integration of tourism, integrated development of all districts and counties, and the strengthening of regulation on the part of government to ensure the coordinated development of tourism urbanization system.