Abstract：In the fierce competitive environment of economic globalization, marketization and administrative decentralization, a lot of urban governments in China have regarded economic growth as the primary development goal and implemented various urban marketing strategies in order to promote it. The traditional regulatory pattern of urban governance has been changed to entrepreneurial and profit-pursuing ones. Urban government has become super-level enterprise by utilizing administrative and land resources, which are monopolized by it. All kinds of project image, market-directed land transferring and great event brought about by governments are included in urban growth marketing strategies.
This paper, from the perspective of systematic economics, reveals that in the course of urban marketing, local governments and investors have formed various beneficiary coalitions, and urban growth machine is coming into being. While such a marketing strategy obtains short-term, superficial economic growth and tremendous changes of urban landscape, it has also caused severe side effects in economy, society and space, leading to urban dimensional expanding and land use inefficiency and ignoring common benefit and social fairness.
It's believed that under the fierce competitive circumstances, urban marketing is a process of spatial reproduction of cities, a strategic instrument for capital increment promoted by urban governments. It is impractical to keep local governments out of the profit-pursuing pattern of urban growth machine. At any rate, pure utilitarian mode of official-business coalition must be abandoned, and endogenetic and sustainable urban marketing strategy should be established, so as to give a boost to the transformation of urban government from ‘growth one as single aim’ to ‘developing one as overall aims’. The so-called endogenetic urban marketing strategy stresses upgrading of urban long-term competitiveness and sustainable developing ability, better coordination and long-term mutual action between local government and target communities, which will cause the investment in the whole society to be benefited in a maximum way. Due to the progressive reform in China, it is easy for local governments to implement the influence of institutional transformation effectively to benefit from rent seeking via building various growth coalitions, for urban economic growth.
张京祥, 于涛, 殷洁. 试论营销型城市增长策略及其效应反思——基于城市增长机器理论的分析[J]. 人文地理, 2008, 23(3): 7-11.
ZHANG Jing-xiang, YU Tao, YIN Jie. RESEARCH ON THE GROWTH STRATEGY OF CITY PROMOTION AND ITS EFFECTS——Based on the Theory of Urban Growth Machine. HUMAN GEOGRAPHY, 2008, 23(3): 7-11.
