Co-sponsored by The Urban Displacement Project and Center for Latin American Studies
Photo: CIPUV’s Atlas of Urban Growth
In most Argentina’s cities, wealth and opportunities coexist with urban informality, poor housing quality and lack of basic infrastructure, traffic congestion, inequality and segregation. In all, land and urban policies are two main determinants. Still, there is less understanding on why the balance in some cities is tilted more to one side or the other. Thus, would some current urban policies be doing more harm than benefit?
In this lecture, some of the most pressing urban topics that are part of current policy debates in Argentina and Latin American cities are presented and discussed. Those are related to urban growth, land use regulation, informal urbanization, value capture/taxation, and the adoption of new technologies in urban mobility. Professor Goytia’ lecture requests for more rigorous evidence on “what works” when framing appropriate public policy interventions and suggests a collaborative research agenda between North-South academic institutions for addressing the challenges ahead.
About the speaker:
Professor Cynthia Goytia is Head of the MSc. in Urban Economics at Torcuato Di Tella University in Buenos Aires, Argentina where she also chairs the Urban Policy and Housing Research Center (Centro de Investigaciones de Politicas Urbanas y de Vivienda-CIPUV), the leading research institution in Latin America specialized in urban policies.
She is focused in the rigorous assessment of urban policies effects, providing robust evidence on what works for cities and metropolitan regions, focused on the evaluation of the causal impacts of urban policies, from infrastructure to formal and informal land markets and housing.
She develops a relevant body of academic research that bridges the gap knowledge gap between urban economics and planning academic scholarship, published in specialized publications and books, some of them recently released in Chinese. Her research adopts innovative tools, such as big data analytics, and a persistent aim to develop digital tools to increase the public’s understanding of academic research results, which could improve and contributes to more informed governments’ policy decisions.
She holds a M.Sc. in Urban Economics and a Ph.D from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in UK. She lectures at University of Cambridge, LSE and the Institute of Housing Studies and is a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University. She is a senior urban consultant to Argentina’s and Latin American governments, the World Bank, United Nations, Inter-American Development Bank and CAF (Banca de Desarrollo de America Latina), and fellow to the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.