全球化和区域竞争引发了广泛的城市合作实践。城市合作是特定地域空间中城市共生演化的动态过程,城市合作的形成与发展,是多种行为主体在多种环境因素和历史因素作用下互动博弈的结果。以新近兴起的演化经济学和演化经济地理学为基础,建构了一个城市合作研究的演化分析框架,探讨了城市合作的本质和内容,分析了我国城市合作模式的类别、演化过程和不同模式的有效性。城市合作的本质在于追求包括分享、匹配和学习三大效应的更高层级的集聚经济,演化理论可以为研究城市群的演化过程,探索适合我国国情和区域发展实际的城市合作模式。

In response to the challenges from the speeding-up globalization and the furious regional competition, more and more cities search to cooperate and to build partnerships each other by the ways such as urban agglomeration, urban cohesion, city-region and urban integration. In this paper, by using the evolutionery thinking based on evolutionary economics and evolutionary economic geography, we develop an evolutionary framework to analyze urban cooperation in China and investigate its nature, content, machnism and key factors. With reference to the practice of Chinese urban cooperation, we survey the patterns of Chinese inter-city cooperation which can be categorized into four types: information communication, subject association, economic integration and institutional integration. We find that the process of urban cooperation is a complex system; the basic nature and aim of inter-city cooperation is to pursue urban agglomeration economy which includes sharing, matching and learning effects exiting not only in a single city, but also in city-region, urban cluster and urban system at different spatial scale and level. In the first two phases of information communication and subject association, the geographical and raltional proximities based on spatial distance and social capital or relational asset take the key roles; but in the last two phases of economic integation and institutional integration, urban cooperation depends more and more on the institutional proximity based on the cultural identity, economic agreement and policy Act. The Chinese urban cooperation is mainly drived by the market forces and government powers which come from the processes of decentralization, marketization and; globalization; the evolutionary theory is a potential and powerful approach to research the evolutionary process of urban agglomeration and the patterns of urban cooperation which takes place in Chinese context of transitional economy and the practice of regional development.