Managing the City-Region Like a Startup: Entrepreneurialism and Shifting Local Economic Governance in Developing Countries

The emerging experience of cities in the Global South regarding the complexity of their response to territorial competition's pressures requires the rethinking of the very concept of urban competitiveness. This study proposes the distributionally-sensitive modeling of urban competitiveness (DS-MUC) in a perspective that is driven by the norm of Equity. The DS-MUC is posited as a critical theory to neoliberalism and as a contribution to the social sustainability and to the normative investigation of post-capitalist urban transformations in the Global South.The application of the DS-MUC in the investigation of Da Nang in Vietnam and Cebu City in the Philippines reveals that an interactive, relational and network-based entrepreneurial governance's capacity has a much greater proclivity to deliver Equity and therefore to achieve a 'high-quality competitiveness' than a city's organizing capacity embedded in illiberal, state-paternalistic and public-sector monopolistic arrangements.