City governments are actively involved in enhancing the development potential of their territories. They mobilize public capital to influence development. In this article, a conceptual framework is constructed around two factors that trigger the mobilization of public capital: (1) a perception of imbalance between a city's competitive tax burden and service-delivery levels and (2) city officials' vision of the appropriate place for their city amid what they consider to be relevant cities. Trigger mechanisms produce four city-level orientations to development that are labeled survivalist, market, expansionist, and maintenance. In an application of the conceptual framework, data are presented from representative cities.
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