نشریه اقتصاد و برنامه ریزی شهری
سال دوم شماره 7 (پاییز 1389)

This article reviews the economic globalization process and the growth of advanced services in some regions of the world, and then defines World City and Global City. Next, it considers the formation and growth of Advanced Economic Functions such as Advanced Producer Services from the Economic Geography point of view.Consequently, it tries to explain mentioned services of geography and the influential criteria for locationing these services and finally states its results. The main goal of this article is to introduce a list of the Advanced Economic functions in the world metropolises and invite the third world metropolitan planners, managers and policy makers to reflect upon this crucial issue.

After the Second World War, different countries started to restore their economy and thus economic growth has turned to the most important preoccupation. It appeared, however, after several decades, that economic growth per se can not make economic conditions improve in the vast area of the country and among various social strata and thus economic growth paradigm came into appearance.Along with the growing procedure of global economy, international communications have also increased and the phenomenon of economic globalization was taken into consideration. But "Metropolitan Area" was something which paved the way for this process to occur. Globalization of economy irrespective of competition between metropolitan areas is meaningless.As a result, metropolitan areas have so far played more fundamental roles in the national economic development of countries and will do even more in the future. Yet, national economic development of countries and the over emphasis on the urban life as well as making a large human being's gatherings called Metropolis has led into plenty of negative consequences, too.It is clear, through the passage of time, that these metropolitan areas have caused both the severe damage to the environment and the earth ecologically and the suppression of future generation rights in exactly the same manner of their usefulness in producing wealth and welfare for people. In other words, people made metropolitan areas to lead a better life; however, these areas themselves incur the most dangerous harms in the existence of the earth and human being's life. This article is aimed at critical consideration of the effects of globalized economy on metropolitan areas. It tries to clarify the impact of metropolises on the growth and development of countries and cities while demonstrating some dimensions of the phenomenon which developed countries attempt to hide.

In the early 21st century, globalization and innovation in IT arenas have caused cities, like multinational companies, to have increasing competition in trans-national atmosphere to get economic advantages. Therefore, no urban spots in the world cities can depend on their traditional places and roles in urban hierarchy; as other cities, are competing in a network structure to enhance their place and overcome their rivals. This competition makes urban brand form and provides a positive image of a city in global urban network structure. So, in recent years, urban managers have made an increasing effort to enhance their city in global metropolitan's network and provide substantial economic interests for their citizens.Today, this goal has been achieved through understanding and adopting competition intelligence approach that is purposeful monitoring of the environment in which the organization is competing and working, and has been developed through aiming strategic decisions.Using this approach, particularly strategy finding tools for having competition with other cities, urban managers are prepared and provide their strategy in trans-national arenas. In order to compete with other cities strategy finding is a technique which multi-national companies use to compete with other companies and their own marketing in the 20th century. They tried to analyze their competitor's behaviors and provide their new strategies to compete with these behaviors. Today, these tools are used by urban managers to take the maximum advantage of forehead opportunities to compete with other cities in the network and advance their cities to achieve the maximum economic advantages for developing them. In this article, metropolitan's competition setting is discussed through descriptive-analytic methodology. Metropolitan's competition environment in trans-national arenas, competition intelligence approach conditions and the applicability of strategic tools in urban management are also analyzed.

Urban Economics in Iran has been on the decline in recent two decades, like its Cities Economy, as a result of not being thought of its nature properly. Yet, the decline has always had ups and downs. The publication of Urban Economics by Tehran Municipality demonstrates that this city is escaping its decline by means of a thorough reflection upon Economy. Since metropolitan area's municipalities can not rely on oil revenues, they do not have any financial resources other than urban economics, thus the survival of their organization and services depends on the dynamicity and sustainability of its economy. However, it appears that its essence has not yet been fully realized.Self sufficiency enactment of metropolitan area's municipalities in 1368 has made the dissemination of "misunderstanding" in urban economics. This misunderstanding which appeared in the form of micro Economics dominancy in the urban economics has been one of the two main reasons or the primary improper building block "dysfunctioning" in the urban economics, which in turn culminates in "dysplasia" or dysmorphia of the city space. The second main reason was the industrial procedure and even pre-industrial dominancy on development economy (development plans) of Iran up to the Fourth Development Plan. In spite of the fact that this procedure was put aside in the Fourth Development Plan, and the development of the knowledge-base economy or post-industrialism was put on the agenda, it was not followed in practice. As a result of these two inappropriate views dominancy upon the cities economics, especially metropolitan areas of Iran whose economic dynamicity and sustainability depends on the entrance into post-industrialism era, they were on the verge of partial collapse and it is crystal clear in housing, business and industrial worn-out structures. In this article, the shortcomings of urban economics and the economy of Iranian cities are taken into account, in the form of an introduction or so. We hope that the due attention to the sources of misunderstandings, current dysfunctioning, dysplasia and dysmorphia in Iranian cities would be the primary step for their removal from our urban life.

Increasing the population of big cities in developing countries has caused many problems and inconveniencies for residential space and metropolitan areas. Thus, they began to renovate and regenerate their environment. Therefore optimum urban hierarchy, and optimal city size has been concerned by urban economists since 1950’s. Here, we use a surplus function approach, which is defined as the difference between the total disposable income and the total expenditure of the households working and living in the metropolitan areas. The optimal city size refers to such a population of metropolitan areas that maximizes the surplus function. The estimated results show that the optimal city size of Iranian metropolitan areas was a population of about 1.25 million, which means that the Tehran metropolitan area, with nearly 7.7 million inhabitants, is obviously too large.