Dr Igor Calzada
About
The holder of an MBA from the University of Deusto, Dr Calzada is an academic entrepreneur working in the field of innovative economic and geographic processes in cities and regions, with a focus on cases and issues of regional and metropolitan devolution and governance. In particular, he focuses on European City-Region and Smart City benchmarking case studies through the application of qualitative and action research methods.
He has also worked outside academia with stakeholders in the public, private and civic society sectors. In the public sector, he has held the positions of Director of Research and Innovation for the Basque Regional Government (2009-2010) and Scientific Director of the City-Region Congress (2012). In the private sector, he worked for more than a decade at the worldwide Mondragon Co-operative Corporation and as a deputy manager of SMEs (1997-2002). He is also a founder of spin-out company, Translokal SL Academic Entrepreneurship for Policy Making.
Expertise
- Future of cities, urban transformations, smart cities and smart citizens, city to city learning, urban living labs, experimental cities, urban laboratories, urban cooperatives
- Technopolitics of data, blockchain, big data, artificial intelligence, social physics, machine learning, open data, dataism, data literacy
- Hyper-connected societies, unplugging
- Algorithmic nations, devolution, European politics, secessionism, political regionalism, self-determination, right to decide, civic vs ethnic nationalism
- Democratic legitimacy in politics, metropolitanisation
- Innovation, future trends and prospective cities, technology and politics
Selected publications
- (Smart) Citizens from Data Providers to Decision-Makers? The Case Study of Barcelona.
- Algorithmic Nations: Seeing Like a City-Regional and Techno-Political Conceptual Assemblage.
- Political Regionalism: Devolution, Metropolitanisation, and the Right to Decide
- From Smart Cities to Experimental Cities
- Local Entrepreneurship Through a Multistakeholders’ Tourism Living Lab in the Post-Violence/Peripheral Era in the Basque Country
- Do Digital Social Networks Foster Civilian Participation among Millennials? Kitchenware Revolution and 15M Democratic Regeneration Cases
Media experience
Dr Calzada has experience of working with the media, particularly Spanish and Latin American regional and national media.
Recent media work
Languages
English, Spanish and Basque