5 Territorial Competitiveness:

Lineages, Practices, Ideologies

with David Wachsmuth

Since the 1980s, the notion of territorial competitiveness has become one of the foun-
dations of mainstream, “entrepreneurial” approaches to local economic development.1
This concept is premised on the assumption that subnational territories – cities
and metropolitan regions, in particular – must compete with one another for eco-
nomic survival through the attraction of transnationally mobile capital investment.
The invocation of territorial competitiveness is generally accompanied by the asser-
tion that various types of (national, regional or local) institutional transformation
and policy reorientation are required in order to enhance locationally specific socio-
economic assets. Such assumptions – and, more generally, a widespread sense of
panic among local policy makers and urban planners regarding the perceived
“threats” of worldwide interlocality competition – have figured crucially in the pro-
liferation of a broad array of political initiatives oriented towards promoting urban
territorial competitiveness during the last four decades. Such policies have appeared
in diverse forms (neoliberal, centrist and social democratic), at various spatial scales
(from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development [OECD], the
World Bank and national intergovernmental systems to metropolitan regions,
municipalities and even neighborhoods), and under a range of labels (industrial dis-
tricts, clustering, science parks, technopoles, human capital, global cities, creative
cities, and so forth). But they have all generally entailed an abandonment of earlier
concerns with sociospatial redistribution and “balanced” urbanization, and a con-
certed emphasis on enhancing the “attractiveness” of a local economy for external
capital investment, positioning a city strategically within supranational circuits of
capital, bolstering local socioeconomic assets and downsizing the administrative
infrastructures of large-scale public agencies. In this sense, the rise of territorial
competitiveness as a concept has been intertwined with a major reorientation of
urban governance regimes across the world economy.
Against the background of these strategic and institutional realignments, this
chapter explores the lineages of territorial competitiveness discourses within and
beyond the field of urban planning, their intellectual basis, and their implications

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for public policies oriented towards promoting local economic development. We
argue that, despite its contemporary pervasiveness, the concept of territorial com-
petitiveness is premised upon flawed intellectual assumptions, and serves primar-
ily as a means of ideological mystification in the sphere of local policy development.
Rather than offering a basis for viable local economic development policies, it
obfuscates the restructuring processes that are under way within and among contem-
porary cities, and thus contributes to the formulation of ineffective, wasteful and
socially polarizing policies. Our somewhat gloomy conclusion is that, because so
many localities within the global interurban system have adopted policies oriented
towards the promotion of territorial competitiveness, significant strategic disadvan-
tages accrue to those localities that attempt to opt out of such policies, or to adopt
alternatives to them. Thus, in the absence of comprehensive global or supranational
regulatory reform, escape routes from this apparent “competitiveness trap” pres-
ently appear circumscribed.
Our analysis is focused primarily upon North American and western European
developments during the last four decades. It is important to note, however, that
the concept of territorial competitiveness has been mobilized as a key element of
local economic policy and urban planning discourse in cities, regions and states
throughout the world economy.2 More systematic analysis of territorial competitive-
ness policies in the major cities of the global South awaits further research and
debate. We hope that the critical orientation elaborated here might provide a useful
reference point for such discussions.

“Compete or die”

Since the early 1980s, one of the foundations of mainstream approaches to local
economic development planning in North America and western Europe has been
the notion of an intensified global competition among cities for external capital
investment and for localized competitive advantages. In this view, global economic
restructuring is a ferociously competitive struggle not merely between capitalist
firms, but between economic territories, generally localities, cities or city-regions.
According to one typical formulation, “In the present context of internationalization,
the historical competition between cities has acquired a special importance. Every
large European city tries to find the right mode to compete with others in an

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increasingly competitive framework. That competition is played out at two levels:
the global and the European.” 3 Analogous assumptions regarding the intensification
of interurban competition in Europe underpin a special issue of the journal Urban
Studies devoted to the theme of “Competitive Cities.” 4 Countless additional examples
of such arguments can be found throughout the recent academic literature on urban
development.
These visions of intensified interlocality competition have also been pervasive in
local policy and urban planning discourse, beginning in the USA during the 1970s,
and soon thereafter diffusing to western Europe, East Asia and beyond. References
to the “threat,” “problem” or “challenge” of interurban competition abound in
policy reports, press releases and glossy brochures published by municipal govern-
ments, planning offices, chambers of commerce and urban economic development
agencies throughout the world. Various models of the changing global and supra-
national urban hierarchies, often influenced by politically neutralized versions of
world city theory, have come to figure quite prominently in such documents,
enabling local boosterists and political entrepreneurs proudly to advertise their own
city’s ranking while representing as dramatically as possible the ways in which other
closely ranked cities are poised to threaten local competitive advantages. Although
the structure of world urban hierarchies remains a matter of continued debate
among academic urbanists, most city marketing agencies have developed home-
grown “benchmarking” techniques for representing their own city’s ranking within
the hierarchy in the most favorable light possible.5 Indeed, the assumption that cities
compete against one another has become so naturalized among local policy mak-
ers that most discussions of the issue accept such competition as a self-evident fact,
and turn immediately to the problem of local economic development strategy.
The notion of interlocality competition has played an essential role in the mobi-
lization of what David Harvey famously labeled “entrepreneurial” urban policies,
which entail the mobilization of local political institutions to enhance the territo-
rially embedded competitive advantages of cities and city-regions in relation to
supranational or global spaces of perceived economic competition.6 Due to their
intensive focus on the need to bolster place-specific, territorially inscribed socio-
economic assets, such strategies of local economic development have also been
characterized as urban locational policies.7 Crucially, then, there is a direct link
between the increasingly widespread vision of a worldwide interlocality competition
and the growing emphasis in policy and planning circles on localized forms of

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territorial competitiveness. Policies oriented towards the latter goal are generally
justified as strategic responses to the former state of affairs.
Commenting on the European situation in the 1990s, Dutch urbanists Leo van
den Berg and Erik Braun explicitly asserted this connection by declaring that “cities
and towns are waking up to the fact [sic ] that an entrepreneurial and anticipatory
policy is called for to cope with urban and regional competition.”8 Most academic
commentators on entrepreneurial cities have likewise tended to accept uncritically
these “declarations of economic war” among local policy makers and boosterists,
taking for granted that they represent a relatively transparent reflection of a radically
transformed geoeconomic situation, and that territorial competitiveness
represents a coherent, justifiable concern in such a context. As Gillian Bristow
explains, “Competitiveness is portrayed as the means by which regional economies
are externally validated in an era of globalisation, such that there can be no principled
objection to policies and strategies deemed to be competitiveness-enhancing, what-
ever their indirect consequences.”9 In short, urban commentators, planners and
policy makers alike appear to have convinced themselves that interlocality
competition has become an ineluctable fact of life in an age of “globalization,” to
which localities have no choice but to adjust or else risk incurring serious economic
disadvantages. Both in theory and in practice, contemporary discourses of inter-
locality competition and territorial competitiveness suggest a grim categorical
imperative: “compete or die.” 10

Geoeconomic contexts of territorial competitiveness policy

Whether under the rubric of urban entrepreneurialism, urban locational policy, or

territorial competitiveness, policy responses to this new categorical imperative must
be contextualized in relation to at least four fundamental geoeconomic transforma-
tions: deindustrialization and reindustrialization; the information and logistics
revolution; the rise of flexible forms of industrial organization; and the globalization
of finance capital.11

− Deindustrialization and reindustrialization. The post-1970s round of deindustrializa-

tion and reindustrialization has generated dramatic decline in older industrial
regions and equally dramatic growth within “sunrise” regions specialized, in

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 particular, in producer and financial services, high-technology industries and
other advanced forms of revitalized craft production.12 Confronted with these
global sectoral shifts, urban and regional planners have explored new ways of
influencing the sectoral composition of their territories – whether through the
phasing out, subsidization or modernization of traditional mass production
industries; through the nurturing or direct financing of economic development in
high-tech or producer and financial service sectors; through the mobilization of
property, venture capital and new infrastructural investments to develop entirely
new sectoral specializations within a region; or through some combination of
these strategies. These policy responses have been closely intertwined with new
discourses and practices of competition between particular types of cities – for
instance, between cities that are attempting to phase out or modernize traditional
industrial sectors, between cities that specialize in similar growth industries, or
between cities that are attempting to attract similar types of external capital
investment.13

− The information and logistics revolution. The information revolution, based primarily
upon the development of new telecommunications technologies, has dramatically
enhanced the capacity of firms to coordinate and recalibrate production networks
on a global scale.14 Meanwhile, the continued deployment of new logistics tech-
nologies has caused the cost and time of commodity circulation to decline signi-
ficantly. Consequently, as Helga Leitner and Eric Sheppard argue, “locational
advantages stemming from accessibility to markets, resources and labour have
become less important relative to other site-specific differences between cities (such
as labour costs, industrial clusters and local governance systems) in affecting their
attractiveness to private investors.” 15 Within at least some niches of the spatial
division of labor, these new technological capacities have also enabled firms to shift
activities more easily among various possible locations as labor costs, taxes or
political conditions change within particular places. Under these circumstances,
local policy makers and urban planners have experienced extensive pressures to
construct place-specific locational advantages for firms within their jurisdictions
that secure the profitability of existing industries while also serving as magnets
for additional external capital investment. Insofar as the competitive advantages
of cities and regions are today technologically, institutionally and politically
constructed rather than being based upon pregiven factor endowments or static

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 locational conditions, new regulatory imperatives have arisen above all on the
local and regional scales to coordinate, maintain and enhance the place-specific
preconditions for economic growth.16 In most older industrial states, local and
regional policy makers have understood these new regulatory dilemmas with
reference to a zero-sum competition between locations to attract investment
from mobile corporations.17

− New forms of industrial organization. The erosion of traditional Fordist mass produc-
tion systems, with their large-scale agglomerations of fixed capital and labor-
power, has also had important consequences for urban governance. The shift
towards putatively more “flexible” forms of industrial organization in recent
decades appears to have significantly reduced the costs of fixed investment in any
given location for the simple reason that “smaller plants can be built, which take
fewer years to pay for.” 18 Insofar as fixed capital investment costs can be paid off
more swiftly, the mobility of capital is thereby enhanced, for “it now takes fewer
years before a production facility is paid for; at which time the firm will reassess
the benefits of continuing production in that city.” 19 In this new environment of
“flexibilized” industrial organization, local policy makers and planners are con-
fronted with intensified pressures continually to upgrade the infrastructures of
transportation, communication and production within their jurisdictional bound-
aries in order to anticipate the shifting locational requirements of the industrial
sectors they wish to attract and cultivate.

− The globalization of finance. Under conditions of sustained economic crisis, capital

seeks new outlets to protect itself from devalorization. The massive financializa-
tion of capital that has occurred on a world scale since the early 1980s can be
viewed as one such strategy to this end.20 Processes of financialization have
changed the conditions for urban and regional governance in significant ways,
most crucially by altering the regulatory frameworks through which local and
regional governments borrow money to finance and sustain fixed capital invest-
ments within their jurisdictions.21 The international range of financial institutions,
instruments and mechanisms through which money can be borrowed and lent
has massively increased since the 1970s, opening up new financial options for
many localities, but also subjecting them more directly to the volatile seas of global
financial markets. The bankruptcy of Orange County, California, in 1994 due to

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 its speculative investments in futures markets and the near bankruptcy of Jeffer-
son County, Alabama, in 2009 at the hands of JP Morgan–designed synthetic de-
rivatives represent two typical instances of the major risks to which cities and re-
gions are being subjected in contemporary “casino capitalism.”22 Such
bankruptcies, generally followed by politically aggressive, socially regressive local
austerity measures, have become far more commonplace, especially in the USA,
following the Wall Street crisis of 2008.23 To the extent that local governments
and planning agencies are now being constrained to repay their loans within a
strict time frame, pressures to enhance the employment capacity and tax yield of
the local economy or to slash local budgets are also significantly increased.24 In
short, as local governments come to rely more extensively upon global financial
markets to fund economic development projects, they are also subjected to a
range of new fiscal constraints, making a politics of territorial competitiveness
appear not only plausible but essential for longer-term urban planning and deve-
lopment.

Taken together, then, these geoeconomic transformations have entailed a variety of

new pressures upon cities and regions around the world to (re)activate economic
development within their boundaries. According to Harvey, the rise of entrepre-
neurial forms of urban governance and associated discourses of local territorial
competitiveness has entailed nothing less than “a radical reconstruction of central
to local state relations and the cutting free of local state activities from the welfare
state and the Keynesian compromise.” 25 In this sense, the proliferation of territo-
rial competitiveness policy has been inextricably intertwined with a fundamental
restructuring of inherited Keynesian state forms and the crystallization of new,
post-Keynesian formations of statehood: a rescaled institutional rule-regime
oriented towards a neoliberalization of intergovernmental and interscalar relations
across the world economy. 26

Contours of territorial competitiveness policy

Within the field of local and regional economic policy, the new emphasis on terri-
torial competitiveness represents a striking discursive and ideological realignment,
not only in specialized industrial districts and global cities, but in traditional centers

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of manu facturing as well. Whereas priorities such as balanced urbanization,
territorial redistribution and sociospatial equalization prevailed across much of the older
industrialized and state-socialist world from the 1950s up through the mid-1970s,
the worldwide economic crises of the latter decade seriously destabilized the polit-
ical coalitions and institutional architectures that had been constructed to promote
such agendas.27 In stark contrast, within territorial competitiveness discourses,
cities and city-regions are no longer represented as mere transmission belts under-
girding national economic regimes or as concentrations of standardized, fixed
capital investments and land resources. Instead, they are described as flexible,
internationalized milieux endowed with place-specific locational assets, innovation
networks and endogenous learning capacities that must be continually upgraded in
relation to competing local economies. Internal networks of cooperation, both
between firms and between major public and private actors, are increasingly viewed
as an optimal basis on which to compete more effectively in an uncertain geoeco-
nomic environment.28
At any spatial scale, territorial competitiveness policies hinge upon the assump-
tion that territorial units, like capitalist firms, compete against one another in order
to maximize profits and economic growth. In this viewpoint, the competitiveness
of a given territory is said to flow from its capacity to achieve these goals effectively
and durably, whether by attracting inward investment flows, by lowering investment
costs, by increasing productivity levels, by providing a suitably skilled labor force,
by creating an innovative environment or by means of other strategies intended to
enhance the value of economic activities located within its boundaries.29 The goal
of territorial competitiveness policy, therefore, is to maintain and expand the
capacities for profit-making and economic growth that are thought to be embed-
ded within, or potentially attached to, specific political jurisdictions.
For present purposes, it is not necessary to embrace a particular definition of
competitiveness, either for firms or for territories. Our point is simply to observe
that, since the early 1980s, national, regional and urban policy makers and planners
across western Europe, North America, East Asia and elsewhere have become con-
cerned to enhance various attributes of cities and city-regions that are considered
to contribute to their “competitiveness” relative to other global investment loca-
tions.30 Given the earlier, Fordist-Keynesian understanding of cities as localized
subunits of national economies, this new emphasis on urban territorial competitive-
ness in relation to supranational circuits of capital represents a striking political,

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ideological and scalar realignment.31 The proliferation of territorial competitiveness
policies during the last four decades is at once an expression and an outcome of this
changing conception of how cities and metropolitan regions contribute to, and
function within, economic life.
While such policies are frequently justified with reference to the widely dissem-
inated writings of corporate strategists such as Michael Porter and Kenichi Ohmae,
they have been grounded, in practice, upon a diverse range of assumptions regard-
ing the sources of competitive advantage within local economies and the role of
state institutions in promoting the latter. 32 We do not attempt here to compare sys-
tematically the nationally, regionally and locally specific types of territorial compet-
itiveness policies that have crystallized during the last four decades, though this
would undoubtedly be an illuminating exercise. Instead, we proceed on a more
abstract, meso-level in order to specify three analytical axes on which such policies
may be decoded.

1. Forms of territorial competition. According to Michael Storper and Richard Walker’s

foundational distinction, interfirm competition under capitalism occurs in weak
and strong forms.33 Whereas weak competition is oriented towards the reduction
of costs and the redistribution of resources within a given spatial division of
labor (static comparative advantages), strong competition is oriented towards the
transformation of the conditions of production in order to introduce new tech-
nological capacities and a new spatial division of labor (dynamic competitive
advantages). Territorial competitiveness policies may likewise be oriented towards
weak or strong forms of interfirm competition, depending on the balance of cost
cutting, deregulatory state initiatives and those that attempt to enhance firm pro-
ductivity and innovative milieux within the jurisdiction in question.34 Neoliberal
or defensive approaches to competitiveness policy attempt to capitalize upon
weak forms of interfirm competition; they are based upon the assumption that
lowering the costs of investment within a given territory will attract mobile capital
investment and thus enhance its competitiveness. By contrast, social democratic
or offensive approaches to competitiveness policy attempt to capitalize upon
strong forms of interfirm competition; they are based on the assumption that ter-
ritorial competitiveness hinges upon the provision of nonsubstitutable socio-
economic assets such as innovative capacities, collaborative interfirm networks,
advanced infrastructural facilities and skilled labor power. Within any national or

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 local context, the precise balance among neoliberal/defensive and social democratic/
offensive approaches to territorial competitiveness policy is an object and out-
come of sociopolitical struggles over the form of state intervention into the
urban process.35

2. Fields of territorial competition. Building upon Harvey’s study of urban entrepreneur-

ialism, four distinct fields of territorial competitiveness policy may be delineated
according to the particular circuits of capital they target.36 First, territorial com-
petitiveness policies may attempt to enhance a city’s advantages within spatial divi-
sions of labor, generally by establishing or strengthening place-specific conditions
for the production of particular types of goods and services. Second, territorial
competitiveness policies may attempt to enhance a city’s advantages within spatial
divisions of consumption, generally by creating or strengthening a localized
infrastructure for tourism, leisure or retirement functions. Third, territorial com-
petitiveness policies may attempt to enhance a city’s command-and-control capac-
ities in the spheres of finance, information processing and government. Finally,
territorial competitiveness policies may target governmental subsidies and invest-
ments – the spatial divisions of public redistribution – to promote local econom ic
development. These policies may be locally mobilized, as when municipalities
compete for infrastructure grants from superordinate levels of government, or
they may be carried out in a top-down fashion by national state agencies or, in
the European context, by the European Commission. While these fields of
territorial competition may be distinguished analytically, most competitiveness
policies attempt, in practice, to enhance a city’s position simultaneously within
multiple fields.

3. Geographies of territorial competition. Finally, territorial competitiveness policies entail

the delineation of determinate geographical parameters within which the process
of economic development is to unfold. These parameters may be defined with
reference to three key elements. The first is spaces of competitiveness: the stra-
tegic spaces within which place-specific economic capacities are to be mobilized.
Central business districts, inner-city enterprise zones, revitalized manufacturing
and port areas, and high-technology enclaves are common examples. The second
geographical factor is spaces of competition. These are the broader, often global,
spaces within which urban economies or their component economic zones are

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 to be positioned as putatively attractive investment locations. The global cities of
New York and London are thus understood to be competing within a different
global space from, for example, export processing zones in Manila, Shenzhen and
São Paulo, or manufacturing regions such as Detroit, Manchester or Dortmund.
The final factor is positioning strategies: scale-attuned political initiatives designed
to articulate urban spaces of competitiveness into the supranational spaces of
competition.37 For instance, some territorial competitiveness policies attempt to
transform an urban economy into a key articulation point within a nested hierar-
chy of regional, national and supranational economic spaces. Other such policies
may attempt to reorganize inherited urban hierarchies – whether vertically,
through the promotion of new forms of cooperation among different tiers of
state power; or horizontally, through the promotion of transversal alliances
among geographically dispersed cities occupying complementary positions in the
global division of labor. In this sense, even though all forms of territorial
competitiveness policy strive to position cities and regions favorably within
supranational circuits of capital, this goal may be pursued through diverse
political-geographical strategies.

Territorial competitiveness policies have an inherently speculative character due to

“the inability [of political alliances] to predict exactly which package [of local
investments] will succeed and which will not, in a world of considerable economic
instability and volatility.” 38 Moreover, as we argue below, such policies are often
grounded upon untenable assumptions and unrealistic predictions regarding the
possible future trajectories of local economic development. Despite these endemic
problems, however, the proliferation of territorial competitiveness policies has at
once embodied and accelerated a significant transformation in the character of state
intervention into the urban process during the last four decades: the spatially redis-
tributive state forms of the Fordist-Keynesian-developmentalist period have been
largely superseded by a more fragmented, multiscalar constellation of post-Keynes-
ian state institutions that explicitly promote an intensification of uneven spatial
development within and beyond their jurisdictional boundaries.39

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Measuring competition

As territorial competitiveness has become a key orienting principle of urban policy,

various state and nongovernmental bodies have directed more attention to measuring
it. Tore Fougner has demonstrated how the “competitiveness indexing” and country
“benchmarking” performed by organizations such as the World Economic Forum
have helped discursively normalize the competitiveness concept at the national
scale.40 The quantitative, technocratic methodologies used to construct indices and
to rank countries are only feasible, though, because of the relative abundance,
quality and uniformity of national statistics. In many cases, the relevant data do not
exist for cities and urban regions, while methodological differences in defining cities
and metropolitan areas makes international comparisons doubly problematic.
It should not be surprising, then, that the last few decades have witnessed a
marked increase in efforts to statistically delineate urban regions, to standardize
these delineations, and to use them to rank and compare cities with one another.
Such initiatives must confront two separate but related questions. First, who is com-
peting? In other words, how is the relevant unit of territorial competition to be
defined? Second, what are the stakes and spoils of this competition? In other words,
what are the appropriate benchmarks for deciding which territorial units are com-
peting most successfully?
The first question has been by and large answered with reference to the increas-
ingly popular concept of the metropolitan region. This concept was introduced as
a statistical measure in the United States around the beginning of the twentieth cen-
tury, but has become a major keyword in contemporary discussions among plan-
ners and policy makers regarding the prospects of local spaces in the global econ-
omy.41 During the last several decades, the concept of the metropolitan region (or
some variant thereof) is increasingly being adopted throughout the world as the
standard urban measurement concept. In the European Union, for example, the
pan-EU statistical agency has been collaborating with national governments to
standardize the measurement of the “larger urban zone” (LUZ), which is a close
proxy for the metropolitan region, so that LUZs are statistically comparable across
nations.42 Similarly, in 2006, OECD held a conference on standardizing the
measurement of metropolitan regions across its member states. A submission to
the conference by the Greater London Authority lays out the rationale for doing so:

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 London, like many cities, requires an international benchmarking stan-
dard. It needs to compare itself with other cities for the purpose of
identifying best practice for policy… Nor is this need confined to the
authorities responsible for London: national and international gov-
ernments need common standards both to compare the situation of
cities and to allocate and implement policy resources […] It is our view
that having a common standard is more important than having the
right standard since in some senses if there is a common standard
which represents city-regions in a reasonably consistent way then that
itself is the “right” standard.43

There is a marked tension, however, between the varied spaces of competitiveness

that are targeted by contemporary urban policy (from metropolitan regions down
to individual neighborhoods) and the pervasive statistical standardization of the
metropolitan region as the de facto unit of competitiveness. Indeed, in many cases,
the territorial unit being benchmarked and the territorial unit being targeted by
competitiveness policies are completely different. For example, the recent Toronto
Board of Trade competitiveness report compares the Toronto metropolitan region
with a host of others, even though the Toronto metropolitan region encompasses
four different regional governments (in whole or in part) and fully 24 different
municipal governments.44 Which government or government agency is expected to act
on the report’s findings? Moreover, most metropolitan areas are simply commut-
ing zones. Even assuming the possibility of policy coordination across the relevant
state agencies, a commuting zone is only likely to be a sensible unit of analysis for
very specific types of policies (notably labor-market interventions).
The metropolitan region, for better or for worse, has become the primary basis
for defining the city as a globally competitive unit. But what are these metropolitan
regions competing at? Historically, efforts at quantifying national competitiveness
have focused on macroeconomic indicators such as gross domestic product, terms
of trade, and productivity. But, beginning in 1979 with the publication of the Report
on the Competitiveness of European Industry and gaining widespread acceptance in the
writings of Michael Porter, academic and governmental bodies began attempting
to quantify national competitiveness directly.45 Each of the two major annual com-
petitiveness reports currently published – The Global Competitiveness Report and The
World Competitiveness Yearbook – constructs multidimensional indices to measure,

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respectively, “the set of factors, policies and institutions that determine the level of
productivity of a country” and “the ability of nations to create and maintain an
environment which sustains the competitiveness of enterprises.” 46 The substantial
difference between these two formulations already demonstrates that “competitive-
ness,” unlike GDP or terms of trade, is an ambiguous term; the challenge is not
only to measure it, but to elaborate a definition that is precise enough to enable such
measurement.
Urban competitiveness benchmarks began to be produced somewhat after
national ones, particularly since the early 1990s. Although the discursive terrain of
urban competitiveness benchmarking is still very much in formation, the two most
influential concepts for such discussions have been “global cities” and “creative
cities.” The former notion is loosely derived from the pioneering work of John
Friedmann on hierarchies of world cities within the new international division of
labor, and Saskia Sassen on the concentration of financial and producer services
functions in specific urban regions.47 However, most benchmarking strategies that
invoke such concepts bracket the strongly critical thrust of Friedmann and Sassen’s
interventions, which emphasized the socially polarizing consequences of financial-
ization and labor market dualization within major metropolitan regions. Instead,
those who invoke the global cities concept for benchmarking purposes generally
adopt an affirmative, boosterist approach to cities’ efforts to position themselves
strategically as financial centers within the global division of labor. Richard Florida,
who popularized the idea of creative cities, has been focused much more
unapologetically on competitiveness, benchmarking and urban policy, and has
devoted considerable energies to marketing his own particular formula for local
economic development to cities and subnational governments around the world.48
Florida argues that a new “creative class” is the lynchpin of modern economic suc-
cess, and that cities must compete to attract these highly mobile creative profession-
als through supply-side policies to attract technology, talent and tolerance. Despite
its dubious methodology, Florida has become quite successful in selling municipal
governments on his Creativity Index.49
Both approaches to urban benchmarking suggest specific, privileged domains of
global urban competition. In this respect, they differ from the general national com-
petitiveness rankings discussed above (although the Creativity Index, for example,
is in practice nearly as broad as each of the two major national indices). But the
underlying arbitrariness of competitiveness benchmarking makes it a common tool

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for boards of trade, place-promotion agencies, local chambers of commerce, local
economic development corporations and other urban development interests to justify
policies that supposedly enhance competitiveness. There are usually two different
messages, each aimed at a different target. One is the purported need to promote
competitiveness, and is aimed primarily at local government; the other is the city’s
purported success at promoting competitiveness, and is aimed primarily at mobile
capital. The local “competitiveness reports” that are produced by such organizations
tend to follow national ones in comparing cities across a broad range of indicators.50
As long as governmental and nongovernmental organizations remain committed to
the idea of urban regions as the key competitive territorial units in the global econ-
omy, we should expect further, more elaborate initiatives to increase quantitative
measurement and comparison of these regions. 51

Decoding territorial competitiveness

The premise of competitiveness benchmarking is that it clarifies the process by

which cities and city-regions are competing. But the very concept of territorial com-
petitiveness is a cipher: it masks as much as it reveals about urban governance and
interlocality interaction in the contemporary age. 52 Consequently, like so many
other popular catchphrases in the contemporary globalization debates – such as the
“hypermobility” of capital, the “weakening” of the state and the “deterritorialization” of
social space – the notion of territorial competition must be systematically decoded.
As a number of commentators have indicated, the notion of territorial competi-
tiveness rests upon an untenable analogy between capitalist firms and urban terri-
tories.53 According to Paul Krugman’s now-famous polemic against popular US
economists such as Robert Reich and Lester Thurow, competitiveness becomes a
“dangerous obsession” when applied to any organizational entities other than
capitalist firms. It is logically incoherent, in Krugman’s view, to apply the concept
of competitiveness to national territories because they “have no well-defined bottom
line”: “countries […] do not go out of business” and thus cannot be understood
appropriately as wealth-creating machines.54 Insofar as firms must define their
“bottom line” in terms of profits, Krugman argues, they are the only organizations
to which the attribute of competitiveness can be defensibly ascribed. On this basis,
Krugman concludes that the notion of territorial competitiveness should be

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eradicated entirely both from social-scientific investigation and from political de-
bate, for it contributes to vacuous analyses and wasteful policies.
Given the problematic, highly amorphous character of the notion of compe-
titiveness when applied to territorial units rather than firms, what explains the
proliferation of local strategies for achieving this elusive but almost universally
endorsed goal during the last three decades?55 Why, in short, has the “dangerous
obsession” of local territorial competitiveness become such a popular indulgence
among policy makers and other local boosterists? Unfortunately, Krugman’s
critique brackets this crucial question by attributing such policies to the supposed
intellectual sloppiness and incompetence of their proponents. Yet, as Peter Dicken
appropriately cautions:

Whether Krugman is right or wrong in his analysis, there seems little

likelihood of policy makers actually heeding his warnings and refrain-
ing from both the rhetoric and the reality of competitive policy measures.
As long as the concept of national [or local] competitiveness remains
in currency then no single state [or municipality] is likely to opt out.56

Critiques by Krugman and others notwithstanding, then, it would be seriously

misleading to dismiss the intense policy concern with something called “competitive-
ness” as a mere conceptual fallacy or ideological fantasy. Rather, we suggest that the
rise of territorial competitiveness policies represents a more general realignment of
contemporary state institutions towards various forms of transnational economic
competition, signaling the formation of what some authors have termed “competi-
tion states.” 57 Although neoliberalism is a particularly significant manifestation of
this multiscalar, productivist reorientation of national state power, it is only one
among many political forms in which such competition states have been consoli-
dated.
But here emerges a second major problem with the concept of territorial com-
petitiveness. The concept of interlocality competition attributes to cities agentic
properties and posits their competitive interaction as unified territorial collectivi-
ties. However, the determinate politico-institutional conditions under which local-
ities might become agentic, and adopt competitive orientations towards other
localities, are generally presumed rather than interrogated. As Harvey notes, the
reification of cities into “active agents” must be avoided insofar as capitalist urban-

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ization is “a spatially grounded social process in which a wide range of different
actors with quite different objectives and agendas interact through a particular con-
figuration of interlocking spatial practices.” 58 Cities are localized social structures
in which any number of highly antagonistic spatial practices – including class rela-
tions, accumulation strategies and diverse politico-ideological projects – arise and
are reproduced.59 Accordingly, as Leslie Budd explains, “To propose cities or  regions
competing with each other presupposes a unity of purpose between the constituent
economic and social interests and that city governance has an autonomy and
freedom of manoeuvre.” 60
The point, however, is not to deny that the different actors located within cities
may, under certain conditions, organize collectively to promote common interests
and agendas, but rather to emphasize that such collective mobilizations cannot be
abstractly presupposed. As Kevin Cox and Andrew Mair explain:

If people interpret localised social structures in explicitly territorial

terms, come to view their interests and identities as “local,” and then
act upon that view by mobilising locally defined organisations to fur-
ther their interests in a manner that would not be possible were they
to act separately, then it seems eminently reasonable to talk about
“locality as agent.” 61

The local territorial alliances that result from such mobilizations have played an
important role in the historical geography of capitalist urbanization. For instance,
urban growth machines – coalitions of land-based elites oriented towards a maxi-
mization of local property values – have long played a shaping role in US urban
development and represent what is perhaps the paradigmatic example of such
alliances.62 Other forms of local territorial alliances, based upon diverse regimes of
public-private collaboration, cross-class coalitions and place-based attachments of
various kinds, have likewise emerged at various spatial scales throughout the history
of capitalist urbanization in other national contexts.63
According to David Harvey’s classic analysis of the issue in Limits to Capital, the
essential basis for the formation of local territorial alliances is the fact that:

a portion of the total social capital has to be rendered immobile in

order to give the remaining capital greater flexibility of movement.

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 The value of capital, once it is locked into immobile physical and social
infrastructures, has to be defended if it is not to be devalued.64

Therefore, territorial alliances to promote economic growth within a particular city

or city-region are generally (but not necessarily) anchored within those factions of
capital and labor whose resources and interests are most closely tied to various
large-scale immobile infrastructures and investments within the city, such as real
estate, fixed capital outlays, utilities and infrastructural facilities. Harvey’s explana-
tion of this fundamental and recurrent tendency towards a “regionalization of class
and factional struggle” under capitalism is worth quoting at length:

Some factions of capital are more committed to immobile investment

than others. Land and property owners, developers and builders, the
local state and those who hold the mortgage debt have everything to
gain from forging a local alliance to protect and promote local inter-
ests and to ward off the threat of localized, place-specific devalua-
tion.  Production capital which cannot easily move may support
the alliance and be tempted to buy local labour peace and skills through
compromises over wages and work conditions – thereby gaining the
benefits of co-operation from labour and a rising effective demand
for wage goods in local markets. Factions of labour that have, through
struggle or historical accident, managed to create islands of privilege
within a sea of exploitation may also rally to the cause of the alliance.
Furthermore, if a local compromise between capital and labour is
helpful to local accumulation, then the bourgeoisie as a whole may
support it. The basis is laid for the rise of a territorially based alliance
between various factions of capital, the local state and even whole
classes, in defense of social reproduction processes (both accumu-
lation and the reproduction of labour power) within a particular
territory. The basis for the alliance rests, it must be stressed, on the
need to make a certain portion of capital immobile in order to give
the remainder freedom to move.65

The resultant localized territorial alliances are grounded upon formal and infor-
mal partnerships among diverse local institutions and actors, including chambers

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of commerce, trade unions, local planning authorities, the city government itself
and, above all, different factions of capital and labor. 66 As Harvey elsewhere notes,
the overarching objective of such territorial alliances is “to preserve or enhance
achieved models of production and consumption, dominant technological mixes
and patterns of social relations, profit and wage levels, the qualities of labor power
and entrepreneurial-managerial skills, social and physical infrastructures, and the
cultural qualities of living and working.” 67 To accomplish these wide-ranging goals,
territorial alliances generally mobilize scale-specific accumulation strategies in
which certain locally rooted locational assets are selected and actively promoted.68
We thus arrive at the following result: cities and city regions can be said to engage
in interlocality competition only to the extent that territorial alliances are formed –
whether at local or supralocal scales – with the explicit goal of promoting a specific
locality as a unit within such competition. In the absence of such alliances, it is log-
ically incoherent to speak of the city as an agent; and in the absence of an entire
urban system permeated by such alliances, it is logically incoherent to speak of inter-
locality competition. Interlocality or territorial competition is therefore better
understood as a horizontal relationship between growth- and investment-oriented
territorial alliances, rather than as a vertical relationship between immobile places
and mobile flows of capital, or, for that matter, with reference to conventional
notions of capital versus communities, flows versus places or the global versus the
local. It is a shorthand term, in this view, for describing the macrogeographical field of
strategic interaction among competing, locally or regionally based territorial alliances.
From this perspective, territorial competitiveness policies cannot be explained
simply as a localized response to the supposed constraints imposed by enhanced 
interlocality competition; they must be seen, first and foremost, as basic animators
of that competition which simultaneously naturalize it and make it appear inevita-
ble. And, as we discuss below, as the number of territorial alliances engaged in such
competitive interactions expands, powerful incentives to adopt competitiveness-
oriented urban policies, and thus to join the competitive fray, are imposed upon
those localities that had previously attempted to opt out.69 Nonetheless, the role of
territorial competitiveness policies as a generative force within interlocality com-
petition cannot be grasped adequately if they are interpreted only as a reaction to
externally imposed pressures. The shift towards territorial competitiveness policies
is, therefore, best conceived not merely as a transition undergone by individual

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cities, but as a relational transformation of a large-scale urban hierarchy due to the
intensified competitive interaction of multiple local territorial alliances within it.

Regulatory failures of territorial competitiveness policy

Territorial competitiveness policies are now pervasive in cities and city-regions

across the world economy – but their apparent omnipresence tells us little regard-
ing their effectiveness in practice. In fact, despite the claims made on behalf of such
policies by their advocates, there is little empirical evidence that they actually serve
the major purposes to which they are put. Rather, the bulk of critical social science
analysis of such policies suggests that their main effects are regressive, wasteful and
dysfunctional, whether in economic, administrative or political terms.70
As we have discussed, the perception of intensified interlocality competition
enhances competitive pressures upon subnational administrative units to offer
favorable terms to potential investors. As territorial competitiveness policies have
subsequently been diffused, the potential disadvantages of a failure or refusal to
introduce them have escalated. Despite this, there is currently little evidence that
territorial competitiveness policies generate positive-sum, supply-side gains for
local economies, for instance, by upgrading locally embedded industrial capacities.
More frequently, such initiatives have entailed public subsidies to private firms,
leading to a zero-sum redistribution of capital investment among competing loca-
tions. In this manner, territorial competitiveness policies may induce inefficient
allocations of public resources as taxpayer revenues are channeled towards the
promotion of private accumulation rather than towards the general conditions of
production or social expenditures. Hence, as Paul Cheshire and Ian Gordon
conclude, “much territorial competition [among cities] is pure waste.” 71
Additionally, the proliferation of territorial competitiveness policies has encour-
aged “the search for short-term gains at the expense of more important longer-term
investments in the health of cities and the well-being of their residents.”72 Even
though some cities have managed to acquire short-term competitive advantages
through the early adoption of territorial competitiveness policies, such advantages
have generally been eroded as analogous policies have been diffused among simi-
larly positioned cities within wider spatial divisions of labor. In this sense, while
territorial competitiveness policies have helped unleash short-term bursts of eco-

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nomic growth within some cities and regions, they have proven far less effective in
sustaining that growth over the medium- or long-term. 73
A further problem concerns the limited geographical reach of territorial compet-
itiveness policies, which generally entail the targeting of strategic, globally connected
urban regions, or specific locations therein, as the engines of national economic
dynamism. Such policies are premised upon the assumption that enhanced urban
territorial competitiveness will benefit the broader regional and national space-econ-
omies in which cities are embedded. In practice, however, territorial competitiveness
policies have contributed to the establishment of technologically advanced, globally
connected urban enclaves that generate only limited spillover effects into their
surrounding territories. This tendency towards “glocal enclavization” is being
articulated at a local scale, as advanced infrastructural hubs and high-technology
production centers are delinked from adjoining neighborhoods, and at supralocal
scales, as globally competitive agglomerations are delinked from older industrial
regions, contiguous or nearby hinterlands, and other marginalized spaces within
the same national territory. 74 The resultant intensification of territorial inequality
may undermine macroeconomic stability; it may also breed divisive, disruptive
political conflicts.
Particularly in their defensive, neoliberal forms, territorial competitiveness
policies have encouraged a race to the bottom in social service provision as national,
regional and municipal governments attempt to reduce the costs of capital invest-
ment within their territorial jurisdictions. This process of regulatory undercutting
is dysfunctional on a number of levels: it aggravates rather than alleviates munici-
pal fiscal and regulatory problems; it worsens life chances for significant segments
of local and national populations; and it exacerbates entrenched inequalities within
national urban hierarchies. 75
The aforementioned regulatory problems may assume more moderate forms in
conjunction with offensive, social-democratic forms of territorial competitiveness
policy. Nonetheless, offensive forms of territorial competitiveness policy are
likewise prone to significant crisis tendencies. First, like defensive approaches to
territorial competitiveness policy, offensive approaches “operate … as a strategy for
strengthening some territories vis-à-vis other territories and other nations”; they
thus intensify uneven development beyond the territorial zones in which they are
deployed. 76 The macroeconomic instability that subsequently ensues may under-
mine the very localized socioeconomic assets upon which offensive territorial

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competitiveness policies depend. Second, even more so than defensive forms of ter-
ritorial competitiveness policy, offensive approaches to urban economic development
suffer from serious problems of politicization. Their effectiveness hinges upon
being confined to locally delineated areas; yet the apparent successes of such
strategies at a local scale generate intense distributional pressures as other localities
and regions within the same national territory strive to replicate the “recipe” or to
reap some of its financial benefits. 77
The proliferation of place-specific strategies of territorial competitiveness
exacerbates coordination problems within and among national, regional and local
state institutions. First, because territorial competitiveness policies enhance the
geographical differentiation of state regulatory activities without embedding sub-
national competitive strategies within an encompassing national policy framework,
they have undermined the organizational coherence and functional integration of
state institutions. Second, this lack of supranational or national regulatory coordi-
nation in the field of urban policy may exacerbate the economic crisis tendencies
discussed above: it enhances the likelihood that identical or analogous growth strat-
egies may be replicated serially across wider urban systems, thus accelerating the
diffusion of zero-sum forms of interlocality competition. 78
Finally, the proliferation of territorial competitiveness policies has frequently
generated new conflicts regarding democratic accountability and political legitima-
tion. Many of the new, highly fragmented institutional forms established to imple-
ment territorial competitiveness policies are dominated by unelected government
bureaucrats, technical experts, property developers and corporate elites who are not
accountable to the populations that are most directly affected by their activities. 79
While this lack of political accountability may enable regulatory agencies to imple-
ment such policies more efficiently, it systematically undermines their ability to
address broader social needs and to maintain territorial cohesion. It may also
generate serious legitimation deficits if oppositional social forces are able to politicize
the negative socioeconomic consequences of territorial competitiveness policies
or their undemocratic character.
These considerations obviously paint a much gloomier picture of territorial com-
petitiveness discourse and practice than that found in the mainstream literature on
local economic development or, for that matter, that promoted by boosterist terri-
torial alliances mobilized around specific projects to promote locational policies
within cities or city-regions. Our analysis suggests that territorial competitiveness

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is, at core, an ideological keyword that facilitates regressive institutional, distributive
and political shifts; undermines the localized preconditions for economic
development; destabilizes the organizational infrastructure for urban and regional
governance; and contributes to the further erosion of inherited relays of democratic
accountability. To be sure, we do not mean to suggest that either the ideology or
the practice of territorial competitiveness is in itself the cause of the developments
sketched above, which are obviously intertwined with a complex ensemble of
geoeconomic and geopolitical transformations and associated institutional contes-
tations. Our goal here, rather, has been to expose some of the problematic intellec-
tual assumptions that underpin this concept, to outline some of the regressive uses
to which it has been put, and to underscore its essentially political-ideological
character.

Beyond the competitiveness trap?

Paradoxically, despite the massively dysfunctional consequences outlined above, the

widespread adoption of policies oriented towards local territorial competitiveness
imposes powerful constraints upon any subnational governance institutions that
attempt to forge alternative policy orientations. Insofar as national states, regions and
cities that do try to opt out from competitiveness policies or other entrepreneurial
strategies may accrue serious economic disadvantages in terms of lost investment,
jobs and tax revenues, the “incentive … to try to gain at the expense of other states
[and cities]” remains extremely powerful.80 As David Harvey analogously notes of
entrepreneurial urban policies (invoking Marx’s famous description of intercapi-
talist competition as an “external coercive power” over individual capitalists):

Indeed to the degree that inter-urban competition becomes more

potent, it will almost certainly operate as an “external coercive power”
over individual cities to bring them closer into line with the discipline
and logic of capitalist development.81

These arguments thus point towards the urgent question: can an alternative
discourse and practice of local economic development be elaborated? Can localities
escape from the “competitiveness trap” to which they have apparently been

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consigned due to the last four decades of worldwide geoeconomic and geopolitical
restructuring?
At the present time, various pathways of urban governance restructuring remain
possible, but competitiveness-oriented agendas appear to be as entrenched than
ever, not least because they have been so broadly naturalized as taken-for-granted
priorities for economic policy at all spatial scales.82 As we contemplate this rather
grim scenario, Harvey’s analysis of urban entrepreneurialism from the 1980s
remains remarkably prescient. As he then explained:

The problem is to devise a geopolitical strategy of inter-urban link-

age that mitigates inter-urban competition and shifts political hori-
zons away from the locality and into a more generalisable challenge
to capitalist uneven development […] [A] critical perspective on urban
entrepreneurialism indicates not only its negative impacts but its
potentiality for transformation into a progressive urban corporatism,
armed with a keen geopolitical sense of how to build alliances and
linkages across space in such a way as to mitigate if not challenge the
hegemonic dynamic of capitalist accumulation to dominate the his-
torical geography of social life.83

How, when and where such a geopolitical strategy might be adopted, and what
slogan might be most appropriate to its aspirations – the “right to the city” may
provide one especially salient possibility – are questions that remain to be fought
out in cities, city-regions and, indeed, at all other spatial scales of governance.

Notes

1 David Harvey, “From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism: The Transformation of Urban Gover-

nance in Late Capitalism,” Geografiska Annaler: Series B Human Geography 71, no. 1 (1989): 3 –17.
2 See, for example, Tore Fougner, “The State, International Competitiveness and Neoliberal Globali-
sation: Is There a Future beyond the 'Competition State,’ ” Review of International Studies 33 (2006):
165–85; Bob Jessop, “The Crisis of the National Spatio-temporal Fix and the Ecological Dominance
of Globalizing Capitalism,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 24, no. 2 (2000): 323–60;
and Ann Markusen, ed., Reigning In the Competition for Capital (Kalamazoo, MI: W. E. Upjohn Institute
for Employment Research, 2007).
3 Joan-Eugeni Sánchez, “Competitive Political and Administrative Systems,” in European Cities in
Competition, ed. Chris Jensen-Butler and Jan van Weesep (Aldershot: Avebury, 1997), 463.

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4 See, for example, Iain Begg, “Cities and Competitiveness,” Urban Studies 36, no. 5– 6 (1999): 795–810;
Ian Gordon, “Internationalization and Urban Competition,” Urban Studies 36, no. 5– 6 (1999): 1001–
16; and William Lever, “Competitive Cities in Europe,” Urban Studies 36, no. 5– 6 (1999): 1029 – 44.
5 On the structure of world urban hierarchies, see Peter Taylor and Michael Hoyler, “The Spatial Order
of European Cities under Conditions of Contemporary Globalization,” Tijdschrift voor Economische en
Sociale Geografie 91, no. 2 (2000): 176 – 89.
6 Harvey, “From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism.”
7 Neil Brenner, New State Spaces: Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2004).
8 Leo van den Berg and Erik Braun, “Urban Competitiveness, Marketing and the Need for Organising
Capacity,” Urban Studies 36, no. 5– 6 (1999): 987.
9 Gillian Bristow, “Everyone’s a ‘Winner’: Problematising the Discourse of Regional Competitiveness,”
Journal of Economic Geography 5, no. 3 (2005): 285–304.
10 Aram Eisenschitz and Jamie Gough, “Theorizing the State in Local Economic Governance,” Regional
Studies 32, no. 8 (1998): 762.
11 This discussion draws extensively upon the analysis elaborated in Helga Leitner and Eric Sheppard,
“Economic Uncertainty, Inter-Urban Competition and the Efficacy of Entrepreneurialism,” in The
Entrepreneurial City: Geographies of Politics, Regime and Representation, ed. Tim Hall and Phil Hubbard
(Chichester: Wiley, 1998), 286 –93.
12 Michael Storper and Allen Scott, “The Geographical Foundations and Social Regulation of Flexible
Production Complexes,” in The Power of Geography, ed. Jennifer Wolch and Michael Dear (Boston:
Unwin Hyman, 1989), 19 –40.
13 Stefan Krätke, Stadt, Raum, Ökonomie (Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag, 1995), 141.
14 Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996).
15 Leitner and Sheppard, “Economic Uncertainty,” 288.
16 Allen J. Scott, Regions and the World Economy (London: Oxford University Press, 1998).
17 Kevin Cox, “Globalisation, Competition and the Politics of Local Economic Development,” Urban
Studies 32, no. 2 (1995): 213–24.
18 Leitner and Sheppard, “Economic Uncertainty,” 290.
19 Ibid.
20 Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1994); David Harvey, The Enigma of Cap-
ital and the Crises of Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
21 Leitner and Sheppard, “Economic Uncertainty,” 291–93.
22 Susan Strange, The Retreat of the State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
23 Jamie Peck, “Pushing Austerity: State Failure, Municipal Bankruptcy and the Crises of Fiscal Feder-
alism in the USA,” Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 7 (2014): 17 – 44.
24 Leitner and Sheppard, “Economic Uncertainty,” 292.
25 Harvey, “From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism,” 15.
26 See Chapters 3, 6, and 10 in the present volume; as well as Brenner, New State Spaces.
27 Ibid.
28 See, among other works, Michael Storper, The Regional World (New York: Guilford, 1996); Philip Cooke
and Kevin Morgan, The Associational Economy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); and Aram
Eisenschitz and Jamie Gough, The Politics of Local Economic Development (New York: Macmillan, 1993).
29 Begg, “Cities and Competitiveness.”
30 Gordon, “Internationalization and Urban Competition.”

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31 John Lovering, “Creating Discourses rather than Jobs: The Crisis in the Cities and the Transition Fan-
tasies of Intellectuals and Policy Makers,” in Managing Cities: The New Urban Context, ed. Patsy Healey
(London: Wiley, 1995), 109 –26; Pierre Veltz, “The Dynamics of Production Systems, Territories and
Cities,” in Cities, Enterprises and Society on the Eve of the 21st Century, ed. Frank Moulaert and Allen Scott
(London: Pinter, 1997), 78 – 96.
32 Michael Porter, The Competitive Advantage of Nations (London: Macmillan, 1990); Kenichi Ohmae, The
End of the Nation State: The Rise of Regional Economies (New York: Free Press, 1990).
33 Michael Storper and Richard Walker, The Capitalist Imperative: Territory, Technology and Industrial Growth
(London: Blackwell, 1989).
34 Danièle Leborgne and Alain Lipietz, “Two Social Strategies in the Production of New Industrial
Spaces,” in Industrial Change and Regional Development: The Transformation of New Industrial Spaces, ed.
Georges Benko and Mick Dunford (London: Belhaven, 1991), 27 –49.
35 Aram Eisenschitz and Jamie Gough, “The Contradictions of Neo-Keynesian Local Economic Strat-
egy,” Review of International Political Economy 3, no. 3 (1996): 434 –58.
36 Harvey, “From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism.”
37 Jessop, “The Crisis of the National Spatio-Temporal Fix.”
38 Harvey, “From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism,” 10 –11.
39 Brenner, New State Spaces.
40 Fougner, “The State, International Competitiveness and Neoliberal Globalisation.”
41 Scott, Regions and the World Economy.
42 Torbiörn Carlquist, “Revision of the Larger Urban Zones in the Urban Audit Data Collection” (paper
on behalf of Eurostat, Defining and Measuring Metropolitan Regions, Paris, November 27, 2006).
43 Alan Freeman and Paul Cheshire, “Defining and Measuring Metropolitan Regions: A Rationale”
(paper on behalf of the City of London, Defining and Measuring Metropolitan Regions, Paris,
November 27, 2006), 2.
44 Toronto Board of Trade, “Toronto as a Global City: Scorecard on Prosperity” (policy report, Toronto,
March 2009).
45 Porter, The Competitive Advantage of Nations.
46 Fougner, “The State, International Competitiveness and Neoliberal Globalisation,” 313.
47 See Chapter 4 in the present volume, as well as John Friedmann and Goetz Wolff, “World City For-
mation: An Agenda for Research and Action,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 6, no.
3 (1982): 309 –44, and Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo, 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2001).
48 Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community, and
Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2002).
49 For a detailed critique and analysis, see Jamie Peck, “Struggling with the Creative Class,” International
Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29, no. 4 (2005): 740 –70.
50 See, for example, Europe Economics, “The Competitiveness of London: Future Challenges from
Emerging Cities” (policy report, London Chamber of Commerce and Industry, London, April 2008);
Toronto Board of Trade, “Toronto as a Global City.”
51 See, for example, Henry Puderer, “Defining and Measuring Metropolitan Areas: A Comparison Be-
tween Canada and the United States” (paper on behalf of Statistics Canada, Defining and Measur-
ing Metropolitan Regions Conference, Paris, November 27, 2006).
52 Leslie Budd, “Territorial Competition and Globalisation: Scylla and Charybdis of European Cities,”
Urban Studies 35, no. 4 (1998): 663 –85. See also Bristow, “Everyone’s a ‘Winner.’ ”
53 Leitner and Sheppard, “Economic Uncertainty,” 301.

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54 Paul Krugman, “Competitiveness: A Dangerous Obsession,” Foreign Affairs, March/April 1994, 31.
55 See also Begg, “Cities and Competitiveness”; Budd, “Territorial Competition and Globalisation”; Bri-
stow, “Everyone’s a ‘Winner.’ ”
56 Peter Dicken, Global Shift: The Internationalization of Economic Activity, 3rd ed. (New York: Guilford, 1998), 88.
57 Philip Cerny, The Changing Architecture of Politics (London: Sage Publications, 1990); Bob Jessop, The
Future of the Capitalist State (London: Polity, 2005).
58 Harvey, “From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism,” 5.
59 Cox, “Globalisation, Competition and the Politics of Local Economic Development.”
60 Budd, “Territorial Competition and Globalisation,” 670.
61 Kevin Cox and Andrew Mair, “From Localised Social Structures to Localities as Agents,” Environment
and Planning A 23, no. 2 (1991): 198.
62 John Logan and Harry Molotch, Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1987).
63 See, for example, David Harvey, The Urban Experience (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1989); Ann Markusen, Regions: The Economics and Politics of Territory (Totawa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield,
1987); Clarence Stone and Heywood Sanders, eds., The Politics of Urban Development (Lawrence, KS:
University Press of Kansas, 1987); and Bae-Gyoon Park, Richard Child Hill and Asato Saito, eds.,
Locating Neoliberalism in East Asia: Neoliberalizing Spaces in Developmental States (Oxford: Blackwell, 2013).
64 David Harvey, The Limits to Capital (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 419 –20.
65 Ibid., 420.
66 Paul Cheshire and Ian Gordon, “Territorial Competition and the Predictability of Collective (In)Ac-
tion,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Resarch 20, no. 3 (1996): 383– 99.; Stone and Sanders,
eds., The Politics of Urban Development.
67 Harvey, The Urban Experience, 148 –55.
68 Bob Jessop, “The Narrative of Enterprise and the Enterprise of Narrative: Place-marketing and the
Entrepreneurial City,” in The Entrepreneurial City: Geographies of Politics, Regime and Representation, ed. Tim
Hall and Phil Hubbard (Chichester: Wiley, 1998), 77 –102.
69 Leitner and Sheppard, “Economic Uncertainty.”
70 Ibid.; see also Cheshire and Gordon, “Territorial Competition”; Bristow, “Everyone’s a ‘'Winner.’ ”
71 Paul Cheshire and Ian Gordon, eds., Territorial Competition in an Integrating Europe (Aldershot: Avebury,
1995), 122. See also Cheshire and Gordon, “Territorial Competition”; and Bristow, “Everyone’s a
‘Winner.’ ”
72 Leitner and Sheppard, “Economic Uncertainty,” 305.
73 Jamie Peck and Adam Tickell, “Searching for a New Institutional Fix: The After-Fordist Crisis and
Global-Local Disorder,” in Post-Fordism: A Reader, ed. Ash Amin (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 280 –315.
74 Stephen Graham and Simon Martin, Splintering Urbanism (New York: Routledge, 2001).
75 Eisenschitz and Gough, “Theorizing the State in Local Economic Governance.”
76 Leborgne and Lipietz, “Two Social Strategies,” 47.
77 Eisenschitz and Gough, “The Contradictions of Neo-Keynesian Local Economic Strategy.”
78 Ash Amin and Anders Malmberg, “Competing Structural and Institutional Influences on the Geog-
raphy of Production in Europe,” in Amin, Post-Fordism, 227–48.
79 Erik Swyngedouw, “The Heart of the Place: The Resurrection of Locality in an Age of Hyperspace,”
Geografiska Annaler: Series B Human Geography 71, no. 1 (1989): 31– 42.
80 Dicken, Global Shift, 88.
81 Harvey, “From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism,” 10.
82 For further discussion of various scenarios, see Markusen, Reigning In the Competition for Capital.
83 Harvey, “From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism,” 16.

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