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Key Topics: city branding, GDP measurement, urban wealth
Javier Jileta is an entrepreneur and an active policy supporter. Studied a bachelors in economics from Mexico's most renowned economics university ITAM, with a full excellence scholarship, and specialised in finance.
Since 2004, because of his passion for public service, Javier got actively involved in political campaign management, including polling and national strategy, for roughly a third of the states in Mexico during the 2006 presidential campaign. Since 2007, he began working for Mexico City's knowledge initiatives that encompassed from PPPs to rekindling long lost academic and business connections within the Metropolitan Mexico City Area.
Through his shift from political endeavours to knowledge driven policies, Javier was part of the knowledge city initiatives whose conceptual father is serial entrepreneur and visionary Sam Pitroda. Javier became part of Pitroda's global initiatives and founded Scientika NonProfit in 2009.
Scientika in turn has pushed from telecom reform initiatives to elementary school textbooks with clear-cut liberal, tolerant and diversity focused content. These textbooks have more than 500,000 copies printed, and were created through hybrid support of business, government and civil society.
Through Sam Pitroda's support, Javier has been able to contribute to projects in several continents both as a project manager as well as an acting board member. Through this rich interaction and diverse view of what is possible to create and realise, he began to question his neoclassical economics background and decided to join The Bartlett Development Planning Unit at University College London. During the MSc in Urban Development Planning his interaction with the developing communities in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, fuelled his passion to understand what unique threads drive possible development paths that are socially just.
This passion led Javier to focus his PhD studies on understanding Mexico City's unique threads that explain its urban dimension and above all to see what value and social circuits are relevant to push through a fairer Mexico City