ABSTRACT
This introductory chapter situates metropolitan economic development and the political economy of urbanisation in Mexico within the intellectual, academic and policy debates on urbanisation, urban economic development and governance. First, it establishes Latin America as a geographical space meriting special attention when seeking to capture the essence of the accelerated urbanisation, urban growth, expansion and underdevelopment of numerous twenty-first-century cities worldwide. It underscores the need for Latin American urban studies that closely attend to political economic aspects of urban development, addressing the politics involved in development more explicitly. Mexico is analysed as a relevant case study to reveal what happens to a country’s urban and economic development when the growth, complexity and expansion of its urban areas outpace the necessary governance and institutional structures to manage them. With the lack of a unifying and comprehensive urban theory on which to base this investigation, the conceptual and theoretical framework is rather pragmatic, although the notion of the urban land nexus is considered a helpful tool in explaining how urbanisation, cities and metropolitan areas develop in different contexts. Quantitative and qualitative methods are used for this multilevel and comparative study of urbanisation and economic development.
