Urban Competitiveness: A Strategy for Improving City Incomes

The current article, taking an analytic approach, besides considering the importance of competitiveness in metropolises, makes an attempt to take its preconditions into account. Generally, the preconditions for improving competiveness can be dividedinto two factors: soft factors and hard ones. Soft factors, practically, include contentrelated and background issues which have effects on the cities’ economic changes and hard factors are mainly related to the infrastructure and designing of cities. Thus, any planning for improving the status of each metropolis, in its competition with its counterparts, necessitates evaluating environmental conditions and considering the related strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Therefore, cities’ economic development is tightly connected with careful observing of global trends and changes in economic, political, and social domains. The current article, following explicating soft and hard factors which take role in urban competitiveness, brings the factor of social capital - as an example of soft factors - into foreground and, finally, the status quo of the city of Shiraz is expounded so that odds for improving its competitiveness could be investigated.