Igor Calzada

Dr Calzada MBA is an academic entrepreneur working as Lecturer, Research Fellow and Senior Policy Adviser at the:

His main research interest concerns comparing social, economic, democratic and politically innovative processes in cities and regions by paying special attention to cases and issues of regional and metropolitan devolution. In particular, he is focused on investigating European City-Region and Smart City benchmarking case studies through the application of qualitative and action researchmethods.

In his main project, entitled ‘Benchmarking Future City-Regions’ (2012-2015) funded by the RSA (Regional Studies Association) and Ikerbasque (Basque Foundation for Science), he has investigated the city-regional cases of Dublin, Portland, the Basque Country, Oresund, Iceland,Liverpool/ManchesterScotland and Catalonia. In the context of these cases, which are based on either politically driven nationalistic or non-nationalistic economic renewal strategies, he is engaged in interpreting new citizenship and metropolitanisation patterns involving the tensions between recentralisation and independence in city-regions and nation-states, which clearly will ultimately require new policy adjustments both at the national and European Union (EU) levels. At this EU level, currently, he is also conducting research on comparative smart city case studies.

He also has experience outside academia working with stakeholders in the public, private and civic society sectors. In the public sector, he has held the positions of Director of Research for the Basque Regional Government (2008-2010) and Scientific Director of the City-Region Congress (2012). In the private sector, he has worked at the Mondragon Co-operative Corporation Group (2002-2015) and as a Deputy Manager of SMEs (1997-2002). In addition, he has been working as academic entrepreneur and lecturer with civic society groups as well as institutions (2002-2015) from several universities at the international level, specifically, Nevada (USA), Helsinki (Finland) and Mondragon (Spain).