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.

中文翻译：

---

城乡联动规划：欧洲中间城市采用的空间规划自动化内容分析


快速推进的城市化日益加深了城市与周边郊区和农村地区的相互依存关系，从而带来了独特的规划挑战。然而，对于如何通过空间规划实际解决城乡联系的比较理解有限。本研究探讨了城乡联系被纳入法定和非法定地方空间规划的程度和多样性。具体来说，我们询问城市是否在其计划中解决了城市区域通常存在的广泛的物理和功能联系。我们使用自然语言处理 （NLP） 工具进行自动内容分析，这种方法特别擅长处理大规模文本数据，我们分析了来自 20 个欧洲经合组织国家 125 个所谓中间城市的 257 个城市空间规划。这种方法允许在地方层面对规划内容进行实质性比较。我们发现，城乡联系和城市区域作为规划的补充地域尺度，在非法定计划中更频繁地得到解决，部分在市政府与周边城市共同采用的计划中得到解决。虽然法定计划更多地关注物理联系，例如互锁的建筑区，但非法定计划涵盖更广泛的社会经济维度，包括通勤流、经济和交通规划。这些发现反映了在解决城乡动态问题时更具战略性的非正式规划机制的实际重要性。我们的研究为欧洲地方规划中涉及的各种政策领域提供了重要的见解，并为未来研究城乡规划动态提供了场所。