Abstract
Urbanization is reshaping the relations between cities and their surrounding territories. In particular, urban, suburban, and rural areas become increasingly connected through bidirectional flows of people, goods, and services, as well as interlinked infrastructure, sprawling settlement areas, and integrated environmental systems. As a result, traditional territorial distinctions between cities and their surrounding countryside are becoming increasingly blurred. In many European city-regions, these physical and functional interdependencies (so-called “urban-rural linkages”) cut across municipal borders, creating a reality of political fragmentation in which local governments manage only parts of integrated territories. Addressing cross-border interdependencies requires coordinated planning across jurisdictional boundaries. The idea of actively managing urban-rural linkages through such inter-municipal planning coordination has gained prominence in the European context, where municipalities often enjoy high levels of planning autonomy. It is viewed as a strategic policy objective to promote integrated and sustainable territorial development that accounts for both urban growth and the development needs of surrounding suburban and rural areas. However, empirical knowledge on how urban-rural linkages are addressed in local spatial planning remains limited. This is especially true in the context of intermediate European cities between 100,000 and 1 million inhabitants, which this dissertation argues to be particularly relevant study sites. Within their broader regions, they operate as service and infrastructure hubs, planning nodes, and distribution centers, performing regional gateway functions that position them as bridges between urban, suburban, and rural territories.
Against this backdrop, this dissertation investigates two overarching research questions: To what extent and how are urban-rural linkages addressed in local spatial planning by intermediate cities? And: Which institutional and actor-centered factors in the decision-making environment of intermediate cities facilitate or constrain urban-rural policy coordination in local spatial planning? These questions are approached through complementary theoretical perspectives, drawing on a multi-level governance framework that integrates insights from metropolitan governance, inter-municipal cooperation, and various strands of research within planning studies. The dissertation employs a sequential mixed-methods design, combining quantitative text analysis and statistical analysis of a large sample of European intermediate cities with a qualitative case study comparing local planning practices in the city-regional contexts of Brescia (Italy) and Kassel (Germany). The research is structured around three distinct but interrelated academic articles.
Article 1 provides an exploratory, cross-national account of the occurrence and thematic context of urban-rural linkages in the contents of an extensive collection of 257 local spatial plans from 125 intermediate cities across 20 European countries. Using the inductive quantitative text analysis method of topic modeling, it reveals that while such linkages are rarely dominant topics in local planning, they emerge as cross-cutting themes in relation to issues such as regional competitiveness, settlement structure, and demographic change. Article 2 employs a deductive quantitative text analysis method, combining dictionary analysis with observational data from 119 intermediate cities across 18 European countries, to bridge the gap between descriptive and explanatory analysis. It statistically examines how institutional characteristics of local decision-making contexts shape urban-rural coordination. Relying on a multi-level governance framework, it identifies vertical (national-subnational-local) and horizontal (inter-municipal) institutional variables that shape (facilitate or constrain) coordination outcomes. Article 3 complements the quantitative analyses with a qualitative comparative case study of Brescia and Kassel, which were systematically selected based on the prior quantitative findings. Drawing on desk research and 21 semi-structured expert interviews with local planning stakeholders (decision-makers, officials, academics), the case study reveals a diverse palette of governance arrangements through which urban-rural linkages are addressed in local planning. It further illustrates the interplay between institutional and actor-related factors in shaping coordination outcomes.
Conceptually, this dissertation advances theoretical understandings of urban-rural linkages and policy coordination in fragmented city-regional decision-making contexts through an interdisciplinary framework that bridges political science and spatial planning. Applied to RQ1, this approach reveals the complementary roles of formalized, hierarchical coordination arrangements (e.g., statutory consultation processes and vertical coordination through higher-level planning authorities) and more flexible, adaptive mechanisms (e.g., voluntary coordination bodies and project-specific planning coordination such as inter-municipal natural or business parks) in managing interdependencies across municipal boundaries. Applied to RQ2, it demonstrates the need to consider both institutional structures and actor-centered dynamics to fully explain coordination outcomes. In doing so, it contributes to contemporary debates about metropolitan governance and cross-border planning by situating the city-region as a hybrid and multi-scalar planning space, where diverse vertical and horizontal coordination practices coexist and interact.
Methodologically, the research demonstrates the value of combining large-N quantitative text analysis with statistical modelling and qualitative case study research in a mixed-methods design to link observed patterns in the contents of local spatial plans to explanatory factors and governance practices, illustrating how quantitative breadth and qualitative depth can be productively combined in urban research. The quantitative text analysis contributes to emerging planning scholarship that uses computational tools to systematically analyze policy documents across linguistic and institutional contexts. While revealing the potential of “text as data” methods for comparative planning research, the project also addresses their challenges, such as context-specific vocabulary and the need for extensive manual validation, offering practical lessons for future comparative research.
Empirically, the dissertation creates a unique database of 257 local spatial plans from 125 intermediate European cities, together with detailed metadata. This resource not only supports the project’s own analyses but also provides a foundation for further comparative work. In addition, the findings offer systematic evidence of how intermediate cities, as an under-researched type of urban settlement, address urban-rural linkages in their spatial plans. These insights contribute to the growing literature on intermediate cities by linking their position as regional anchors, with roles ranging from employment and infrastructure hubs to centers of higher education and specialized services, to specific planning practices and coordination arrangements.
The project’s conceptual framework, methodological approach, and empirical evidence collectively advance our understanding of urban-rural linkages as an increasingly relevant yet underexplored reference framework for local planning policy. They reveal how urban-rural linkages are addressed across diverse topics and governance arrangements, and under what institutional and actor-centered conditions coordination is more likely to emerge. Beyond their contributions to the scientific community, the findings yield comparative insights that can inform future policy aimed at strengthening urban-rural linkages and governance capacity in Europe’s fragmented city-regions.