Abstract
This contribution examines how urban-rural policy coordination is organized and enacted in the medium-sized city-regions of Brescia (Italy) and Kassel (Germany). More specifically, it asks i) what institutional arrangements are in place to coordinate spatial policy across municipal borders, and ii) which factors – institutional and actor-centered – shape their functioning. It offers an interdisciplinary perspective on multi-level governance, inter-municipal cooperation, and metropolitan governance, bridging political science and planning studies.
Combining a comparative case study design with expert interviews and document analysis, the findings reveal that coordination is supported not by a single model but by a patchwork of formal and informal arrangements, involving different government levels and actor constellations. The findings further reveal that coordination within these arrangements is shaped by an interplay between institutional structures and actor behavior, including vertical regulatory frameworks and incentive structures, relational qualities, institutional design, and political leadership. Comparing Brescia’s voluntary and emergent coordination approach with Kassel’s mature, institutionalized model reveals additional insights that refine our understanding of the relative importance of such drivers, depending on the levels of institutionalization, commitment, and maturity of arrangements. While in contexts of weakly institutionalized, voluntary, and early-stage coordination, core city leadership and political support seem crucial to sustain coordination experiences, in highly institutionalized contexts with a mandatory model and long-term experiences, interpersonal relations, trust, and cooperative actor behavior become more salient. Overall, the study contributes to ongoing debates in multi-level governance and planning by focusing on medium-sized city-regions, which remain underexplored in the literature.