Abstract
Contemporary city-regions are characterized by thick functional and spatial ties between cities and their surrounding suburban and rural municipalities. These so-called urban-rural linkages create planning challenges that often exceed administrative boundaries and call for policy approaches operating at the cross-jurisdictional spatial scale of the broader city-region. Although planning research has increasingly acknowledged the importance of such cross-jurisdictional coordination, comparatively little is known about how both core cities and their neighboring municipalities articulate urban-rural linkages within their own planning frameworks. Existing studies tend to prioritize city-centered perspectives, leaving the viewpoints of smaller suburban and rural municipalities within city-regions comparatively underexplored.
This study investigates how urban-rural interdependencies are addressed in the Italian city-region of Brescia. It analyzes the contents of statutory local spatial plans issued not only by the core city but also by surrounding municipalities within Brescia's functional urban area. It employs Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods for automated content analysis to systematically examine how different municipalities frame physical, socio-economic, and infrastructural linkages within the broader city-region. This methodological approach enables the comparison of a wide set of planning documents and the identification of thematic patterns across municipalities of varying sizes and institutional capacities.
By mapping how different parts of city-regions engage with urban-rural linkages, the study contributes to a more nuanced understanding of planning dynamics across urban, suburban, and rural municipalities. In particular, it highlights whether and how smaller municipalities frame interdependencies differently from their core cities, thereby broadening current debates on city-regional planning beyond a predominant core city lens.