The planning of urban–rural linkages: An automated content analysis of spatial plans adopted by European intermediate cities

• Intermediate cities address urban-rural linkages through statutory (legally mandated) plans and non-statutory plans. • Statutory plans mainly focus on physical linkages (e.g. interlocking built-up areas). • Non-statutory plans address socio-economic linkages (e.g. commuting, city-regional development). • Combining statutory and non-statutory plans enhances the governance of urban-rural dynamics. • NLP methods allow to identify planning themes from a large-scale comparative analysis. Rapidly advancing urbanization increasingly deepens cities’ interdependencies with surrounding suburban and rural territories, leading to unique planning challenges. Yet, there is limited comparative understanding of how urban–rural linkages are practically addressed through spatial planning. This study explores the extent and variety to which urban–rural linkages are integrated into both statutory and non-statutory local spatial plans. Specifically, we ask whether cities address in their plans the broad set of physical and functional linkages that typically exist within city-regions. Employing natural language processing (NLP) tools for automated content analysis, a method particularly adept at handling large-scale textual data, we analyze 257 municipal spatial plans from 125 so-called intermediate cities across 20 European OECD countries. This approach allows for substantial comparison of planning contents at the local level. We find that urban–rural linkages and the city-region as a complementary territorial scale for planning are addressed more frequently in non-statutory plans and, partially, in plans that were adopted jointly by city governments with surrounding municipalities. While statutory plans show more attention toward physical linkages such as interlocking built-up areas, non-statutory plans encompass broader socio-economic dimensions, including commuting flows, economic, and transport planning. These findings reflect the practical importance of more strategic, informal planning mechanisms when addressing urban–rural dynamics. Our study provides vital insights into the variety of policy fields that are addressed in local planning in Europe and provides venues for future research on urban–rural planning dynamics.