Urban-Rural Relations in Spatial Planning: A Comparative Analysis across European Intermediate Cities

Introduction

Urban areas have grown (and continue to grow) well beyond the territorial jurisdiction of their administrative cores into densely populated, built-up and functionally linked urban regions. While urban and rural development have long been treated as separate policy issues in spatial planning, the last decades have seen the external pageemergence of the concept of urban-rural relationscall_made in both academic and policy discourse as a strategic policy objective to meet this new reality and to guide the integrated development of urban regions. This doctoral project explores to what extent the discourse on urban-rural relations has translated into planning practice at the city-level. A special focus is placed on medium-sized (so-called intermediate cities, or i-cities) as a yet under-researched category of urban settlements. Generally characterized by strong linkages with their rural surroundings for which they act as regional service centers, i-cities are external pageattributed a key role in territorial cohesion and regional developmentcall_made, and expected to be particularly sensitive to urban-rural relations in spatial planning.

The project contributes to a deeper understanding of urban-rural relations as an important reference framework for spatial planning and urban governance across Europe. It is an external dissertation project and consists in a cooperation between the SPUR chair at ETH Zurich and the external pageInstitute for Comparative Federalismcall_made at Eurac Research in Bolzano, Italy. The research topic is linked with the Institute for Comparative Federalism’s Horizon 2020 project “Local Government and the Changing Urban-Rural Interplay (external pageLoGovcall_made)”.

The Project

The research questions at the heart of this doctoral project are the following:

• Does spatial planning in intermediate cities account for urban-rural relations within the broader city-region?
• How can we explain variation in the degree to which urban-rural relations are considered in intermediate cities’ spatial policies?

Moving beyond a simplistic understanding of the “rural” as being separate from the “urban”, urban-rural integration in spatial planning implies an alternative territorial focus of spatial policies on the external pagecity-regioncall_made, as a physically and functionally linked but politically fragmented space for policy intervention in which city authorities are not the sole actors with an impact on policy content. Cities, in elaborating and adopting spatial policies, are embedded in a web of horizontal and vertical relations among actors at various territorial levels who have a stake in participating in the elaboration of policies for future spatial development. This doctoral project elaborates and tests a theoretical framework that integrates theories of spatial planning with insights from external pagemulti-level governance theorycall_made in order to identify the various formal and informal drivers of local policy action that result from this multi-level embeddedness. The idea is to thereby explain variation in the degree to which urban-rural relations are considered in i-cities’ spatial policies.

Towards this aim, the project takes a mixed-methods research approach that combines large-n statistical cross-country comparison with small-n case studies. The first, quantitative stage of the project builds on a sample of 133 i-cities located in 21 European-OECD countries. It combines observational data on the morphological, administrative, economic, socio-demographic, cultural, and institutional characteristics of the city-level territorial context with a computer-based, quantitative text analysis of all spatial policies adopted by the sample cities in order to gain comparative insights into the degree to which urban-rural relations are a topic in urban spatial planning across Europe. The second, qualitative stage of the doctoral project builds on comparative case studies and in particular on semi-structured interviews with local planning stakeholders in four European cities to further deepen the insights gained from the quantitative analysis.

Partners

Eurac Research, external pageInstitute for Comparative Federalismcall_made