{"id":2195,"date":"2018-06-12T19:37:05","date_gmt":"2018-06-12T19:37:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/research.gsd.harvard.edu\/mci\/?page_id=2195"},"modified":"2026-08-27T01:13:12","modified_gmt":"2026-08-27T01:13:12","slug":"faculty-research","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/research.gsd.harvard.edu\/mci\/faculty-research\/","title":{"rendered":"Faculty Research"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Faculty Research<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

 The Mexican Cities Initiative compiles faculty research and work related to Mexico. Click on the links below to view reports and descriptions of faculty research and projects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Building Better Cities with Strategic Investments in Social Housing<\/strong> by Diane Davis<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

A Set of Proposals to Promote Innovation in the Social Housing Sector by Strengthening the Urbanism-Housing Nexus through New Forms of Coordination<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Principal Investigator:<\/strong> Diane Davis<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Research Associates:<\/strong> N\u00e9lida Escobedo Ruiz, Margaret Scott<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Research Assistants:<\/strong> Fernando Granados Franco, Francisco Lara Garc\u00eda, David Schoen Parente
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Building on fieldwork in seven Mexican cities, this report: 1) outlines the major barriers and enablers to densification, 2) identifies a series of challenges that must be overcome if mortgage credits for social housing are to be used to build more sustainable cities, 3) suggests a recalibration of policy goals to emphasize urban value creation and better urbanism rather than densification per se, and 4) proposes a new institutional platform that will help INFONAVIT achieve these goals. Called the Urban Value Creation Platform, its aim is to solicit and enable support for context-specific social housing projects that envision shelter not as an object conceived through a mass production mentality, but rather as a stimulus for assembling healthier neighborhoods and constructing more efficiently organized, environmentally and socially sustainable cities. As a proposed innovation, the Urban Value Creation (UVC) Platform builds its mission around INFONAVIT\u2019s founding principles as a financial institution intended to serve Mexican workers, employers, and the country as a whole, but it brings this mission more in line with recent challenges associated with rapid and sprawling urbanization by promoting the use of a wider range of metrics, incentives, and decision-making processes to ensure that urban value creation impacts are made central to its mortgage programs. In its essence, the UVC Platform challenges the one-size fits all mentality of prior program development, and works under the assumption that through more purposeful engagement with local stakeholders, mediated by INFONAVIT state delegates serving a key role in coordinating and convening conversations around strategic co-investments, workers\u2019 own money can be more productively spent and national urban goals can be more readily achieved. Through its coordinating activities, the Platform will increase the likelihood that mortgage credit support for social housing will create assets for both the individual homeowner and the larger urban environment. If the Platform works as conceived, such investments can be leveraged in ways that also bring medium-term returns back to INFONAVIT, both ensuring financial solvency and making funds available for future projects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Access the full PDF<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Case Study Compendium: Understanding the Barriers and Enablers to Densification at the Metropolitan Level<\/strong> by Diane Davis<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Principal Investigator:<\/strong> Diane Davis<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Research Associates:<\/strong> N\u00e9lida Escobedo Ruiz, Margaret Scott<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Research Assistants: <\/strong>Fernando Granados Franco, Francisco Lara Garc\u00eda, David Schoen Parente<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This document, the second volume of this report presents fieldwork findings from seven cities examined by the Harvard University Graduate School of Design\u2019s Governance Team as part of the larger INFONAVIT project titled \u201cRethinking Social Housing in Mexico.\u201d The case study compendium summarized in the upcoming pages was conducted with an eye to investigating the barriers and enablers to the densification of social housing in Mexico. Its principal focus is the post-2012 period\u2014that is, after new subsidy policies built around the establishment of the per\u00edmetros de contenci\u00f3n urbana (PCUs) were institutionalized at the federal level. Our aim has been to understand the array of demographic, topographical, economic, social, and politicoinstitutional conditions at the metropolitan level that have had some bearing on each city\u2019s densification outcomes. We began by questioning whether cities of different sizes and income or employment characteristics might respond differently to the new policy incentives. To answer these questions, we examined both small and large cities, those with different economic drivers (industry, commerce, tourism, etc.), and those with different political and administrative legacies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Access the full PDF<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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