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From Atom To Bits: Tijuana And Its Competitivity Platform

Urbanism as a catalyst of economic dynamism and the strategic agendas of some cities to rethink their specialties,

Urbanism as a catalyst of economic dynamism and the strategic agendas of some cities to rethink their specialties, reinsert themselves in the twenty first century, and avoid losing relevance in the future, were some of the topics taken on by Ricardo Alvarez, researcher at the Senseable City Lab of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), during the monthly member meeting of the Tijuana Economic Development Corporation (DEITAC).

Alvarez started his presentation explaining that cities are a relatively new invention. As human beings we have been making cities for about 8,000 years and since then we have been reinventing them and emptying out many of our social values, in such a way that they become a reflection of society.

The cities that we live in today are the result of a fast experimentation process due to the fact that the population curve has grown in a historically abnormal way. We have surpassed the threshold of 7 billion people around the world, of which 50% live in urban areas.

According to the United Nations, by 2050 there will be 9.3 billion people, of which 6.3 billion will live in cities. This is relevant as many of the great problems of humanity are eminently urban. Eighty percent of the world GDP, 79% of energy consumption, and 79% of carbon emissions take place in cities, explained Ricardo Alvarez. He then focused of the formulation of the space as an economic variable.

He explained that the function of the density of space by intensification of use is that which- by economic gravity- generates the need to multiply investment funds in infrastructure. That is how large scale infrastructure projects are calculated and justified in time. "Cities are high efficiency entities, each time that the size of a city doubles, its GDP is multiplied by 1.15. Each time that the population of a city is multiplied, the use of infrastructure resources is optimized by .85 per capita. In general, they follow a super linear function, from there stems the importance of structuring long term strategies for urban scaling," he specified.

"Since the nineteenth century it has been established that agglomeration generates gravity models, in which the synergies revalue the economic status. Tijuana is a micro example of this," he emphasized.

The integration of production factors creates an effect of economic complexity, he explained. The clustering of people leads to an increase in the prices in cities and some activities become of very low value versus the cost of space, in such a way that it generates a migration towards higher value economic activities.

Economic complexity, he added, is the accumulated knowledge from the technological, scientific, process, knowledge, design, and legal point of view, etc. to develop productive activities. "The more economic complexity we do, the higher the value function of what is being produced. The race is the migration to activities that integrate greater economic complexity such as development paths, migrating to higher value added industrial sectors, from the automobile sector to the aerospace sector. That is the strategy of many countries with regard to industrial development plans."

The competitiveness platform of Tijuana

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Humanity is taking a jump from the post-industrial era to the information era… to the knowledge era; a profound change that is generating "creative destruction" processes, popularized by Shumpeter in the nineteenth century, commented Ricardo Alvarez. "This change from a post-industrial era to an information era is possibly more profound than the one that meant transiting from agricultural to industrial societies. We are migrating from realities based in atoms to realities based in bits."

"Tijuana has a great non-transferable competitive advantage by.... Continue reading article here

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