Recasting the city into city-regions: Place promotion, competitiveness benchmarking and the quest for urban supremacy

This essay critically examines twenty-two studies designed to measure the competitiveness of cities and city-regions. We suggest that while this research may show statistical correlations between different dimensions of competitiveness, there is little in the way of causation. More fundamentally, our main point is to question the utility of such studies. Regional disparities in terms of wealth and living standards are well known; simply recasting the spatial scale to the city or the city-region does not change the underlying fundamentals of regional performance.