Assembling city-regional imaginaries: The making of Chinese city-regions under state entrepreneurialism
研究揭示了中国长三角城市区域中三种经济想象（垂直竞争力排序、水平均衡发展、内生创新）的构建过程，这些想象反映了国家企业家主义下增长、公平与可持续性之间的政治张力。
In this study, we examine the formulation of city-regions in post-reform China under state entrepreneurialism. While existing literature largely identifies city-regions as new and concrete scales of spatial governance and/or geographical agglomeration, it often overlooks their conceptualisation as economic imaginaries and the actors and constitutive knowledges involved in these efforts. To address this gap, we reveal the diversity of economic imaginaries constituting the Yangtze River Delta city-region, one of China’s most prominent megaregions. We identify the emergence of three types of city-regional imaginaries, each rooted in distinct theoretical lineages, geopolitical rationalities and material practices: vertical ordering of competitiveness, horizontal ordering of balanced development and endogenous innovation. These imaginaries reflect conflicting interests and political tensions deeply embedded within the governance framework of state entrepreneurialism, where the state maintains a dominant role while leveraging market mechanisms to reconcile competing goals of growth, equity and sustainability.