The Competitive City: The Political Economy of Suburbia.

With the rise of cities as geographical units, there have been a growing number of municipal partnerships and networks. Government-led intercity cooperation at regional scaleregional city-to-city (C2C) cooperation booms in the Yangtze River Delta (YRD) region in the last two decades. Urban competitiveness is a concept tied to intercity competition that decides the relative position of cities in urban ranking. In regional C2C cooperation, urban competitiveness serves as the asset of partner-cities and usually as one of the primary targets of the cooperation. However, there is a general lack of studies on the influence of urban competitiveness on regional C2C cooperation. The introduction of the perspective of urban competitiveness is an approach of developing a comprehensive framework connecting factors of regional C2C cooperation. The objective of this research is to analyze the influence of urban competitiveness on regional C2C cooperation in China's local context. In this study, the added value of regional C2C cooperation is divided into added value of urban competitiveness and political added value brought by intervention from upper-level governments. Three typology of C2C cooperation (i.e. hybrid, hierarchical and spontaneous) have