With our global membership, we are aware that much of the research and activity conducted by our members goes unnoticed by the larger community. As part of our commitment to be a key forum in shaping and disseminating advances in regional studies and science, we would like to encourage you to share events and activities that you think might be of interest to others in the RSA community. For those of you who may worry about relevancy and application across borders, we consider that sometimes it only takes a small trigger for inspirational ideas – we hope that our members can provide that trigger for others across the world.
So today’s spotlight is on Mexico, where we recently posted out a call about an ESRC funding opportunity for a Mexico-UK collaboration on smart cities. We would like to share some of the work that our members have recently been taking part in.
Cristina Ibarra-Armenta has recently authored (2018) a paper on private investment and the effects of decentralisation and regional competition between Mexican cities, which aimed to find out the extent to which the funds exerted at the local level induced private investment growth. She previously wrote “Bottom-up or top-down policies to boost investment in Mexico?” in 2017 which identified that different strategies had been followed by two Mexican cities which had achieved higher than average economic growth.
Over the last 21 years, another one of our members, Guillermo Woo Gómez has been working on planning based on regional coordination between sub-regional (state) governments and local governments; in regional initiatives such as regional information systems; metropolitan area planning; infrastructure projects; investment project portfolios; watershed management and tourism. www.centroccidente.org.mx, www.sursureste.org.mx
Finally, Enrique Mota is part of the research team at the Caribbean University in Cancun, Mexico, where he is works in the Observatory of Sustainable Tourism of Quintana Roo. His team is working towards designing sustainable tourism measurement instruments that measure the impact of tourism on the quality of life of the resident community and on the environment at regional levels.
If you would like to get in contact with any of our Mexican members, or you have any news about research or actvities that you would like to share with others, please email Alex.