Since the 1990's, transnational financial investors invest in Mexico' s commercial real estate markets, such as they do in most of the main metropolis of "emerging" countries. Those new actors contribute to reinforce the metropolis' spatial sprawl and its regional structuring. This particular contribution to Mexico's urban production is explained in two ways: first, the transnational financial investments' specificities are explained by the intern and constraining functioning of the transnational financial network that is organized around concepts and tools defined outside Mexico; secondly, their concentration at the periphery of the central State of Mexico metropolis - the Federal District (DF) - is understood through the analysis of the historical construction of the different territories that constitute the metropolitan space. Within the FD, the insertion of transnational financial investors in real estate markets is restrained by competitive developers and investors, who are part of closed social networks characterized by a community functioning and an old favor system. At the periphery, on the contrary, transnational financial investors manage to access to real estate markets more easily because those are embedded in territories more recently urbanized, and where political and economic resources are more fragmented. This thesis contributes then to a better understanding of the modalities through which is realized the financialization of real estate markets and of urban production in a Latin-American metropolis, such as Mexico. It shows that the diffusion of practices, concepts and of a new division of labor promoted by the transnational financial network is at the heart of a power struggle with other preexisting and competitive ways of developing and investing in real estate.
