Planning for urban competitiveness in the region (Case study: Mazandaran province)

One of the new-fashioned approaches to regional development is Regional Competitiveness, which provides increscent economic productivity coupled with regional well-being improvement. Additionally, the Complementary Urban Theory is one of the novel approaches to regional competitiveness planning. It would also be utilized when two or more cities are planned collectively to bring Intended development. Therefore, the following research is conducted to achieve a framework for establishing a competitive urban network at the province scale by taking advantage of extracted indicators. For this purpose, this research looks for beneficial indicators of urban competitiveness with the primary aim of preparing an urban competitive urban network framework at the regional scale.With this in mind, the following research is categorized as quantitative research and applied science. Besides, it uses the analytic hierarchy process (AHP); to evaluate the efficacy of influential factors on urban competitiveness and uses the shift-share; to evaluate the competitive advantage of each of the counties. Finally, it results in five counties having the agricultural rule, eight counties having the service rule, and nine counties having the industrial rule as the primary rule to achieve a complementary network at the regional scale; In fact, the result came by considering the competitive advantage of each of twenty-two counties of the study province, coupled with SWOT analysis, and based on Porter's Diamond Theory.