Abstract
Many cities in the world have had important difficulties in managing the COVID-19 pandemic. Mexico City has registered one of the highest fatality rates in the world. This can be explained by factors related to the health condition of its population. Here we show that failures in the decision-making process in response to the pandemic played a central role. This paper maps the COVID-19 infrastructure developed across various policy sectors by chronologically analyzing the relationship between governance levels (global, federal, city and borough), the geographical scope of the actions implemented and their sociopolitical impact, as well as the network of actors. We argue that given Mexico’s centralized urban governance system, there was a lack of policy sensibility to proximate scales of governance. This illustrates the importance of a multiscale governance of emergency crises such as COVID-19, particularly in cities of the so-called Global South, characterized by marked sociospatial disparities and intense uses of street and domestic spaces.
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Data availability
Our ethics review does not allow for data availability. The qualitative interview data collected for this research following the signature of an informed consent form by the participants cannot be made available because this form guarantees confidentiality. It does not allow us to make the entire transcript publicly available. We also used news outlets, official government statements and social media to complement our interview data in constructing the chronology of events. We did not use quantitative datasets.
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Acknowledgments
We wish to acknowledge our co-researchers of the larger project on which this paper is based: C. Ortiz Chao. A. Vazquez Lemus, M. Aguirre Camarillo, M. F. Perez Pazos and O. Linares. A special thanks also to J. O. Mota Garcia, who began data collection with us but then left the project to pursue another degree. We also thank E. B. Olmedo and R. Diaz for their help in visualizing the content of our analysis. Entitled “Transformación de la Ciudad de México. Acontecimientos recientes y acción ciudadana,” this project was funded by the Programa de Apoyo a Proyectos de Investigación e Innovación Tecnológica (PAPIIT) of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, grant no. IA301722 (principal investigator, J.-A.B.).
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J.-A.B. was the principal investigator of this project and assumed the main responsibility in writing this paper. She conceived and designed the methodology, along with all members of the research team named in the acknowledgments. The application of the methodology and data analysis was jointly conducted with L.D.D.C., who also contributed to writing the first draft of specific sections of this paper (for example, description of the results and methods).
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Nature Cities thanks Ismael Blanco, Tingting Lu and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.
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Boudreau, JA., De Dios Cruz, L. Mexico City’s pandemic urban crisis management lacked a multiscalar approach. Nat Cities 1, 791–798 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44284-024-00142-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s44284-024-00142-5
