Abstract
The contribution analyzes to which degree urban-rural relations appear as a topic in the contents of strategic planning documents adopted by European cities. Urban-rural relations are discussed as a strategic policy objective in European planning discourse, however, so far we lack a systematic understanding on whether and how this objective has translated into the contents of planning policy at the city-level. The concept of urban-rural relations accounts for the cross-jurisdictional nature of contemporary city-regions which are characterized by a host of physical and functional linkages between core cities and their adjacent suburban and rural municipalities. Moving beyond a long-standing dichotomous understanding of urban versus rural areas, it proposes an integrated approach to the spatial development of the city-region, in order to achieve cohesion and to correct for regional disparities in spatial development. From a theoretical perspective, the concept of urban-rural relations is therefore closely linked to the literature on cross-jurisdictional spatial planning in “soft spaces” such as city-regions.
In order to explore the degree to which urban-rural relations are a topic in the contents of city-level spatial policy, natural language processing (NLP) tools are applied to a systematically selected corpus of local master plans and city development strategies, adopted by a sample of 133 intermediate cities in 21 European countries. A series of structural topic models are estimated on the corpus of planning documents in order to explore, firstly, if the contents of the planning document incorporates urban-rural relations, and if this is the case, to secondly identify the policy areas (e.g. housing development, economic growth, or environmental protection) in which these urban-rural relations occur. The outcomes of the text analysis are in a second step combined with observational data on the geographic, socio-economic, and institutional characteristics of the city-level territorial context in which the sample cities are embedded. The aim is to identify whether the type of territory (e.g. mountain, coastal, border territories) in which the cities are located, the economical specialization, the financial resources, or the level of institutional fragmentation of the city-region, among other potential territorial drivers, impact on the occurrence and topics of urban-rural relations in the analyzed policies.
The focus of the empirical analysis lies on intermediate cities between 100’000 and 1 million inhabitants. Intermediate cities are discussed as regional centers for the provision of administrative, economic, cultural, infrastructural and planning functions, servicing both urban and rural populations within their broader region. Due to this role, they are regarded as key players in territorial cohesion, at the intersection of urban and rural development. It is this assumption of strong linkages of the intermediate city to its surrounding region which renders it a theoretically interesting category of settlements to focus on in light of the phenomenon of interest. In sum, the results of the analysis will contribute to a deeper understanding of urban-rural relations as an important reference framework for spatial planning and cross-jurisdictional urban governance across Europe, within the context of the intermediate city as a yet under-researched category of settlements. It further contributes to the thin but growing body of planning research which leverages on the potential of natural language processing (NLP) methods for the comparative analysis of large corpora of planning documents.