Accelerated regional metamorphosis, territorial articulation and financialization in a Mexican intermediate city: The queretaro case

Abstract

In recent decades, some intermediate Mexican cities show a high economic dynamism whose most evident territorial expression has been a dispersed and diffuse expansion over increasingly wideranging spatial areas that generally were considered eminently rural. This is the case of the city of Querétaro and its expansion sphere, scattered over the rural areas of El Marqués and, especially, Colón. In this sense, this work analyses and characterizes the socio-territorial transformation of this expansion area of an intermediate city, through a theoretical-methodological approach of a structural-systemic type, whose unit of analysis goes beyond the city, it includes its linked rural spaces, in which the recent financialization schemes of the real estate sector generate new configurations and spatial inequalities that lead to a dispersed and disorderly occupation of the territory, where the premises of profitability of investors have replaced any coherent urban-regional planning criteria that privileges long-term sustainable local and environmental development.