In 2020, let us all remember the "why" for our actions and choose wisely the "how" we want to accomplish them. Season's Greetings from our team to you!

In light of the end of the COP 25 in Madrid, GIMLA has been invited to moderate a webinar on climate change policy and resilient cities for all. The invited speakers are Rene Hohmann (Cities Alliance), Nicola Borregaard (EBP Chile), and Luis Eduardo Bresciani (PUC Chile).

The second Latam Dialogue focused on Venezuela in order to broaden and contextualize our understanding of its current crisis. The lectures of Mayra Goulart (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro), Renata de Oliveira (Federal University of Latin American Integration), Juan Palacio,  Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana, Jesse Ramirez (University of St.Gallen) were progressively uploaded on the social media channel of the institute and are now also centrally available on our website.  
We are thankful to all lecturers and are already working on the third Dialogue on the issue of Migration.

Within the involvement of GIMLA researchers in a consultancy consortium of three academic networks, Anthony Boanada-Fuchs has been invited for a Capacity Building Hub at the COP 25 to discuss the strengths and current limitations on cross-sectoral collaborations to advance scientific knowledge on climate. The event takes place on December 6 and has been organized by FLACSO Ecuador, the Technical University Berlin, the GIZ/GFA Programa de Ciudades Intermedias Sostenibles, and OLACC / CARE. Further panelists are Holmes Paez and Lisa Bornstein, Mercedes Medina, Eduardo Noboa, and Andrea Carrión.

The University of São Paulo organized a special conference to critically reflect on the first ten years of the Minha Casa Minha Vida program, the Brazilian answer to the global challenge of affordable housing. GIMLA recorded a lecture to present its research on the state of the art of the literature that deployed a systematic review to identify common trends and missing concerns.

In case you missed us at the International Day, come visit us at the next info session on December 03, in the Main Building 01-111, 17:00-18:00. After a lecture presenting you the content and structure of the bachelor exchange semester, we will answer all questions you might still have.

The Dean of External Relations of the University of St.Gallen (HSG) and member of GIMLA's board of directors was awarded a teaching price at the CEMS Annual Event in Vienna. Dr. Peter Lindström developed with students in collaboration with the company Bayer a new hybrid market strategy for their Bayer Women’s Healthcare Switzerland. At the same event, the HSG received the accolade of the CEMS school of the year.

Researchers from the Universities of Campinas, Pennsylvania, St.Gallen, and the Bard College convened for a workshop in Campinas. During the 2-day event, past and ongoing research projects were presented on the overlapping impacts of infrastructure development in the Amazon connected to energy production, logistics, urbanization, and the expansion of agribusiness. The overall aim is to seek out possibilities to better connect these different projects in the future. In the next phase of inter-disciplinary collaboration, research teams from different institutions focusing on different parts of the Amazon could produce a more comprehensive database on the multi-project changes affecting this important ecosystem.

Several experts have been invited to share their views on Venezuela and its ongoing complex crisis. The interviews of the second Latin American Dialogue will be uploaded on a weekly basis. In our first interview, Prof. Mayra Goulart (UFRJ) talks about populism in Venezuela and how the centralized control over natural resources has been affecting the economy and the party politics of that country.

Climate Change and its direct and indirect effects are gaining increasing importance in policy making. The IDB is going to readjust its research priorities for the upcoming years and GIMLA supports its growing concern with urban resilience (how to adapt to but also prevent negative effects in cities linked to changing climate) with background research. Currently, a HSG master student is reviewing the international literature and GIMLA is involved in various initiatives linked to urban resilience (COP 25, UHPH best practice call, JWP Cities Alliance ...). Interested students can contact us to know about current thesis offers.

GIMLA jointly organised an international debate on how and why urban density matters for more sustainable and inclusive cities in Latin America.  One of the keys to unlock more sustainable and inclusive developments in Latin America is through a nuanced understanding and regulation of urban densities. On the one hand, higher densities enable more effective service and infrastructure provision, can boost the local economy, and reduce the urban footprint. On the other, too dense environments negatively impact the environment, health, living quality, and safety.  The UTC took place at the headquarters of the INFONAVIT and invited for a multi-disciplinary debate on density and ultimately on the question of what cities we want. The event (accessible via live stream) was part of the World Urban Campaign, co-organized by GIMLA and had a very promising line-up of knowledge stakeholders on cities and housing in Latin America, including Cities Alliance, Uniapravi, UHPH, Redeus-Lac, Cedeus, Rivha, and Techo.

Within a multi-sectoral effort, GIMLA co-organized an event to join the celebration of the World Metropolitan Day. Acknowledging the pivotal role of cities and the necessity that metropolitan governance play in addressing Sustainable Development Goals, a webinar was held in Mexico to discuss current challenges and developments in the country and reflect on potential learning experiences from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Brazil.

GIMLA has been invited to present the University of St.Gallen and its educational program to prospective future students. Pupils from the Brazilian Swiss School received an overview of the strength and structure of the degree programs with a special focus on the bachelor programs and the application process. We thank the school director Mr Marcel Brunner for the continuous and open dialogue.

After the success of the social media campaign and facebook and in light of the upcoming HSG Latam Term, GIMLA launches its online presence on Linkedin. This channel captures better the European audience and will be used to update the community about important developments of GIMLA, in particular, the Latam Term, as well as serve as a news channel on Latin American affairs.

GIMLA attended the 3rd GPSC a major international event of the Global Platform for Sustainable Cities. This initiative is led by the World Bank and represents an important forum for sharing knowledge and creating partnerships to achieve urban sustainability. The multi-day conference attracts important knowledge stakeholders from around the world to learn from good examples and discuss one of the main challenges of our times. On September 18, the mayor of São Paulo Bruno Covas signed the São Paulo Statement on Urban Sustainability that is an open call to integrate our responses to climate change, biodiversity loss, and social inequality.

The director of GIMLA participated in a concluding research seminar at FAPESP, the São Paulo Research Foundation. Open to the general public, the event aims at presenting and discussing the results of a five-year research project on the socio-economic, environmental, urban, and health impacts of the largest dam ever built in the Amazon: the Belo Monte dam. Vanessa Boanada Fuchs presented the consequences for the local riverine population and discusses the transformations on their ways of life with colleagues from the Michigan State University, Universidade Federal do Pará, Universidade de Campinas, Universidade Federal de Santa. For more information, please consult following website (in Portuguese)

GIMLA receive financial support from Movetia, the Swiss agency to promote mobility in Switzerland, Europe and worldwide, for its second Latam Compact on Social Entrepreneurship in the Brazilian Amazon. The course “Negotiating the Amazon” will start on October 28 and is offered as a block seminar to master students of the University of St.Gallen. A total of 18 students have the chance to reflect on the underlying forces transforming the largest natural forest of the world as well as learn from local initiatives of indigenous communities that combine economic with sustainable and social goals.

Carla Reiss, HSG bachelor student in business administration completed her thesis on smart cities and participation. Informed by ongoing WISE research, the questions was pursued how technological advancement can be used to foster citizen involvement. After reviewing the global literature, an analytical framework was developed that carefully differentiated between different means and tools. Citizens can be targeted through platforms, social media, ICTs, living labs or traditional instruments which was deeper investigated within the smart city project MiMedellin in Colombia.  

In order the close the academia-practice gap, GIMLA aims at co-developing thesis assignments with important knowledge stakeholders in the region. Based on a signed cooperation agreement, a topic has been co-developed with the Alliance for Entrepreneurship and Innovation (AEI) and the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ). Tabea Savoldelli, a current HSG student in Master in Business Management, included a field study visit to Ecuador in order to write her thesis "Fostering Social Entrepreneurship in Ecuador - Gaps in the Enterpreneurial Ecosystem".

Her analysis recognizes the importance of social entrepreneurship in contributing to sustainable development but also a need for active and supportive governments. The study identifies gaps in the entrepreneurship ecosystem of Ecuador and gives recommendations on how social entrepreneurship could be fostered. The results reveal tremendous potential for implementing changes in all domains of the ecosystem. Specific and general insights will be shared with the AIE and GIZ Ecuador. Given the positive feedback of all involved institutions, follow-up possibilities are currently discussed.

The HSG Alumni Club and GIMLA organized a social gathering at a Swiss restaurant in São Paulo to enable networking between old friends, new arrivals and well-established former HSG graduates in Brazil. This convivial relationship is also a fruitful collaboration. GIMLA and the Alumni Club have been expanding the internship offers for current and future HSG exchange students in the region who can profit from working opportunities in local companies led by Alumni members. 

Ana Carolina is the new research assistant of GIMLA and her main tasks are to support the research project of SENTIR as well as assist us in several organizational and administrative task. Carolina obtained her bachelor in administration from the University of Brasilia before completing a master at the School of Economics, Business and Accounting of the University of São Paulo (FEA-USP), one of the institutional partners of the University of St.Gallen. Currently, she is pursuing a PhD and we are looking forward to pursue common goals in the months to come.

The institute director presented research on the ecologies of crisis in the energy sector at the conference of the Development Studies Association (DSA) in Milton Keynes, UK. The panel, convened by the Future Dams Consortium led by prof. David Hulme, will result in a joint-publication raising questions such as the extreme international financialization of the sector, the bypassing of environmental and human safeguards, and the recent fatal accidents caused by dams in Asia and Latin America.

As part of a hands-on internship program promoted by the Swiss School in São Paulo, the student Victor Matthey received the opportunity to learn about Swiss representations in Brazil. During his two-week internship, GIMLA hosted the student for an intensive work-day sharing insights into its various activities. Victor received a glimpse of the research and represent work, attended meetings for academic diplomacy, wrote a social media post and participated in drafting a funding application. GIMLA wishes Victor all the best in his future career.

GIMLA attended the "Embrapii - to innovation" event, organized by SWISSCAM, the Swiss-Brazilian Chamber, together with EMBRAPII, the Brazilian Institution for Research and Industrial Innovation, its Swiss pendant Innosuisse and swissnex Brazil. The event aimed at sharing information on the mechanisms promoting partnerships between Swiss companies, universities and Brazilian startups.

For the second consecutive year, SESCOOP Minas Gerais, a state-level association of Brazilian cooperates, decided to take their high-level executives and managers working in the health, agriculture, and financial sector to the University of St.Gallen. Over the course of a week, participants received an intensive tailor-made executive course organized by the Institute of Management in Latin America and with the active participation of Dr. Christian Opitz and several HSG Professors: Dietmar Grichnik, Harald Tuckermann, Martin Eppler, Sebastian Utz and Simon Evenett. GIMLA would like to thank to all the participants for their trust in us, their level of engagement, and a cauldron of ideas about entrepreneurship, innovation, and sustainability.

A cooperation agreement was signed with the Asociación para el Emprendimiento y la Innovación (AEI) in Ecuador to establish an academic collaboration to support and inform the ongoing activity of the alignment to the SDGs of the Estrategia para el emprendimiento y innovación. The objective of the actualization of the strategy is to render the ecosystem of entrepreneurship and innovation more sustainable. The said activity will be carried out through developing a practice-oriented master thesis of a HSG student.

GIMLA is organizing a special panel at the upcoming IV ISA Forum in Porto Alegre, July 14-18, 2020. The session «The Role of Real Estate Developers in Affordable Housing - Boon or Bane ?» is hosted by the Research Committe Housing and Built Environment (RC43) and aims at stimulating debates around market enablement and the pros and cons of involving developers in answering the global challenge of housing. Submissions by interested researchers can be sent until September 30, 2019 via this link.

Latam Compacts are short-term courses organized for HSG Master students that offer unique insights into Latin American affairs. This course format uses short-term immersion in order to foster skill building, most notably the capacity to adapt to contextual landscapes and situations, to empathize within different cultural contexts, and to create value from sustainable practices.

The next Latam Compacts are scheduled for Fall 2019 (social entrepreneurs in the Amazon, Brazil) and Spring 2020 (smart cities and innovation in Santiago de Chile). An additional offer is currently discussed with Prof. Yvette Sanchez for this year (on a football issue, Rio de Janeiro).

Potentially interested students are invited to contact us to receive more information.

GIMLA is cooperating with the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) to advance practice-oriented research connected to and informed by the demands of policy makers and practitioners in Latin America. The Bank is currently investigating the potential of Business Improvement Districts (BID) for the LAC region. BIDs are a specific form of multi-sector partnerships, where local governments, the business sector and land owners jointly work towards realizing well-managed, clean, safe, attractive urban environments. Despite a broad application in some countries of the Global North, implementation in Latin America has been punctual and at best experimental. Little is known about the success factor of BID (and similar programs) in the world and the major impediments to its application in LAC. Within the project, IDB aims at reviewing the existing literature, developing a toolbox, analyzing case studies, and implementing pilot programs. Currently, two HSG students are writing their thesis on topics related to improving BID application in Latin America.

The World Urban Campaign (WUC) is an advocacy and partnership platform coordinated by UN-Habitat that aims at stimulating debate and araising awareness about positive urban change and the potential and impact of the New Urban Agenda (NUA). A GIMLA initiated and supported application was approved to organize an Urban Thinkers Campus (UTC) in Mexico City end of October 2019. The event «Building more dense and inclusive cities in Latin America” lessons from Policy and Practice» will be co-developed by several institutional partners. More information will be put on this website as well as can be found in news entry of 17.03.2019.

The 1st GIMLA conference took place on April 4 and was hosted by our partner university at FEA-USP. The full day event united leading scholars from various fields to discuss ongoing global power reconfigurations and their impacts on trade and investments opportunities and challenges in Latin America. Simon Evennett, Yvette Sanchez, Thomas Rudolph, and Vanessa Boanada (University St.Gallen) as well as Emilio F. Moran (Michigan State University), Lia Valls (FGV), and Carlos Braga (Fundação Dom Cabral) gave engaging lectures that allowed to connect international trade dynamics and national challenges to actual local changes and livelihood struggles. Based on the shared insights and created networks, GIMLA hopes to develop collaborative projects in the near future that try to shed more light on these complex interconnections. Pictures and more information about the event can be found on our social media site.

GIMLA is looking for a highly motivated Research Assistant to strengthen and support its Institute in São Paulo. More information about the call and the application process can be found here.

Aiming at creating institutional synergies, GIMLA aligned its agenda with various important knowledge stakeholders on the topic of housing. UHPH, Habitat for Humanity, RIHVA, UNIAPRAVI and REDEUS are jointly organizing a housing laboratory (LAV) to take place in Mexico City scheduled for October 23-26, 2019. Students, researchers, practitioners, and policy makers will be interactively working on the topic of density and how densification could support more inclusive and sustainable neighbourhoods.

GIMLA attended an event organized by Swisscam that focused on the major business challenges in the next decade. In the lecture What's next 2030 - As tendências da próxima década, Inovaconsulting outlined their view on the major societal transformations and how they might impacts markets.

The government of Ecuador is undertaking concrete steps towards more sustainable development. The AEI (Alianza para el Emprendimiento e Innovación) with methodological support from UNCTAD has implemented and operationalized the national strategy for fostering entrepreneurialism and innovation in the country. GIZ, through its alliance with AEI, supports a remodeling of this strategy along the objectives stipulated in the Agenda 2030 (SDGs), the Paris Climate Change Accord, and the New Urban Agenda. GIMLA will be proposing practice-oriented thesis offers aligned to these current engagements in order to produce research of relevance that can directly support and influence ongoing policy implementation.

GIMLA is very pleased to announce a close collaboration with the Red Cross São Paulo. The vast mandate of this organization includes, but is not limited to, the active support of disadvantaged sectors of the youth population, refugees and migrants, disaster relief and environmental issues. The agreement is designed to pull institutional resources together to produce research relevant to the humanitarian sector and offer HSG students the opportunity to get acquainted with the relevant work of the organization on site.

After attending last year’s conference, GIMLA is going to present ongoing research findings at the Connected Smart Cities Platform, taking place in São Paulo on September 17-19, 2019. The event aims at generating a larger debate on smart, human, and sustainable cities by uniting researchers, industrial leaders, and governmental forerunners on smart cities ideas and projects.

GIMLA is pleased to welcome the new exchange semester students from the University of St.Gallen at their office. Similar to last semester, this moment is used to get to known each other, clarify certain questions linked to the stay in Brazil, present the work of the HSG institute and discuss ways GIMLA could support the activities of their students.

GIMLA welcomed Anaclaudia Rossbach, the Regional Adviser of Latin America and Caribbean of Cities Alliance and Tereza Herling, Former Secretary for Urban Development in São Paulo to present the challenges and current approaches to urban planning in the city. The brunch talk was attended by students and professors of the University of Edinburg and Heriot-Watt University during their field trip study within the MSc Urban Strategies and Design 18-19.

Are you interested in sustainability, concerned about the environment and the extreme weather events? Thinking how to better govern our world's most precious resource: water? Then join us this April from Monday 08 to Wednesday 10. Students will have the opportunity to dive into real-world problems and engage with stakeholders who have the potential to make positive change!

In order to foster South-South learning, GIMLA organizes a hands-on course on the challenge of incremental housing in Mozambique. Based on ongoing UN-Habitat work, students are asked to learn from current initiatives in the country and other parts of Sub-Saharan Africa and develop their own proposal for a business model or housing finance solution. UN-Habitat consultants, housing and finance experts are providing lectures and feedback in class and via skype. Results will be shared with UN-Habitat and the government of Mozambique and have the potential to change ongoing policy reforms. The course is taught as block seminar in St.Gallen from Thursday 11 to Saturday 13.

Marc Arnold, a bachelor student in business administration, is GIMLA's first visiting HSG student. For a month, Marc, will deepen is interest for and knowledge of Latin America by writing his thesis on the special and differential treatment of developing countries in the area of trade.

GIMLA organises an academic conference this April in Sao Paulo in order to discuss ongoing shifts in the politico-economical global landscape of powers that underlie many recent transformations and emerging conflicts. Several panels are being organised to cast a differentiated light on the opportunities and challenges for Latin America. The confirmed keynote speaker is Prof. Simon Evennett, professor of international trade and economic development at the University of St.Gallen. 

GIMLA would like to share an overview of its activities in 2018 that illustrates the multiple ways the motto and mandate was taken to heart, seeking to foster bilateral research cooperation “from insight to impact”. Published in the form of an end-of-the-year newsletter, the document illustratives a vivid year of activities including an array of small and big successes: the transfer and restructuring of our office to Avenida Paulista; the revitalization of the HSG Alumni Club – Brazil Chapter; the creation of a research network on Smart Cities; or the signature of cooperation agreements for the purposes of co-teaching at our partner universities. The document can be downloaded on our institutional welcome page.