Abstract
Cities have grown well beyond their administrative boundaries to form highly complex city-regions. This poses the challenge of managing growth in a fragmented context where the spatial dimension of urban development no longer corresponds neatly to the administrative jurisdiction of a single city government. In the policy sector of spatial planning, the concept of urban-rural relations has emerged as a strategic policy objective to meet this challenge. Moving beyond a dichotomous understanding of urban versus rural areas, it proposes an integrated view of the contemporary city, its suburban belt, and the surrounding countryside forming a dynamic web of physical and functional interdependencies across municipal boundaries. The paper takes a comparative approach in analyzing to what extent European academic and policy discourse on urban-rural relations has translated into policy practice at the city-level. To this end, natural language processing tools are applied to a large corpus of spatial development policies adopted by a sample of 133 cities across 21 European countries. The aim of the quantitative content analysis is to explore to which degree and how urban-rural relations occur as a topic in the analyzed policy documents.