SPOTLIGHT • DAVID LOPEZ-GARCIA
One of the things you notice very quickly about David López-Garcia (Ph.D. Milano 2021) is that he is a bundle of energy, constantly thinking, making connections, and putting ideas together. He has already published work on a wide range of topics, from the social construction of urban risk to citizen participation, metropolitan fragmentation, and urban mobilities and accessibility.
David received his B.A. from University of Guadalajara and M.S. from the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales campus Ciudad de México. Prior to arriving at The New School, David worked for several Mexican local governments for eight years, volunteered in Mexican non-governmental organizations, and wrote a weekly column of political economy in one of Mexico’s main newspapers.
David brought this energy to the Ph.D. program in the Milano School of Policy, Management, and Environment. He coordinated the Urban Practice Working Group, chaired the research committee for the Doctoral Student Association, and served as a Research Associate for the Observatory on Latin America and for the Global Urban Futures Project, among many other activities. He also served as a Visiting Lecturer at Queens College, CUNY. Currently he is an Assistant Professor of Urban Planning and Policy at the University of Illinois, Chicago, where he co-coordinates the Urban Structure Lab, and is a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Urban Economic Development.
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I had the pleasure of talking with David about his work in general, and specifically about his book Worker Mobility and Urban Policy in Latin America: Policy Interactions and Urban Outcomes in Mexico City, published by Routledge in 2023.
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Joseph Heathcott: Your book engages an exciting new area of research dubbed 'policy interactions.' Could you give us a quick run-down of the idea and how you apply it in your book?
David López-Garcia: In the book I show that the highly unequal mobility experience of workers cannot be fully explained by looking only at one policy domain, such as transportation. Rather, these inequalities are produced by the interaction between urban policy areas that often work at cross-purposes. So in the case of Mexico City, I show how the misalignment between economic development, housing, and transportation policy adversely affects how workers move around the metropolis.
JH: The interaction of policies is such an important but understudied phenomenon. What would you say are your main contributions to the field in this regard?
DLG: I see the book making two main contributions. First, it proposes the Policy Interactions Framework (PIF) with analytical and methodological tools for the empirical investigation of how policies interact in urban settings. Second, it puts forward concept of Choiceless Mobility, defined as a situation in which access to better-quality jobs incases the transportation burden of workers. The causes of increased transport burden would be difficult to trace if you limited your scope just to transportation.
JH: In conducting your research, you ran a series of regressions. Where did you get your data?
DLG: One of the chapters assessed shifts in the location of employment subcenters in Greater Mexico City, which I produced with micro data from the 1999 and 2019 editions of the Economic Census. Another chapter analyzed the spatial distribution of publicly funded mobility resources, which I mapped with data from the 2016 National Housing Inventory. A third chapter mapped mobility situations by analyzing time and distance of the journey to work with data from the 2017 Household Origin Destination Survey.
JH: Could you say a bit more about how you designed the regressions?
DLG: The regressions were designed to answer specific questions using available data and producing my own indicators. For instance, I used well-established methods to classify travel districts into four distinct mobility situations: short commutes, long commutes, wormholes, and travelscarp. I then used a multinomial logistic regression model to assess the extent to which transport-, land use- or socioeconomic-related variables drive the likelihood of a travel district experiencing a specific mobility situation.
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JH: OK. Wormhole. Now I am intrigued. What is a wormhole? And a transit hell?
DLG: Here I am following the framework developed by Michael Niedzielski and Eric Boschmann who proposed the categories. On one hand, a wormhole is a place whose travel distance is above, but travel time is below the city’s average. That is, workers in these places are located further away from their jobs than the average worker, but they get there faster. Some colleagues have suggested that I should've borrowed the term TARDIS from Dr. Who instead! A travelscarp, on the other hand, is a place whose travel distance is below but travel time is above the city’s average. That is, workers in travelscarps are located closer to their jobs but somehow it takes them a long time to reach their jobs.
JH: OK, that helps to paint a picture. Now, was most of your research undertaken remotely, or did you spend time on the ground in Mexico City?
DLG: The book is based on research done both in Mexico City and remotely. I was lucky enough to schedule my fieldwork before the pandemic. I spent the entire Fall of 2018 in Mexico City on a research stay at the National Autonomous University (UNAM) to conduct interviews and focus groups. I went back for a few weeks in the Spring and Summer of 2019 for specific pieces of information that I was missing. Most of the quantitative I could do remotely using open sources and filing micro-data requests at the Mexican National Statistics Institute.
JH: What were your favorite and least favorite parts about being in Mexico City to do research?
DLG: My favorite part was the sustained rush and adrenaline of being in the field. As an urban scholar, nothing compares with being on the mission 24/7 for five straight months. I also enjoyed the iterative nature of my research process. I arrived in Mexico City with a clear idea of what I wanted to look at, but I embraced the uncertainty of not knowing what I would find. I let the research process unfold and loop back to inform the way I thought about my research problem, reshape my research questions, and refine my methods. Back and forth. And then, there was a moment around the month four of fieldwork that patterns emerged and things started to make sense. My dissertation finally had a purpose, and I went all in. As per my least favorite part of doing fieldwork in Mexico City, I can honestly say that I do not have one. I enjoyed every minute of it.
JH: What is at stake in this work for Mexico City residents?
DLG: We need to find policies which are able to slow the production of geographies of low accessibility to jobs and to help the situation of those already living in them. My work shows that the mobility experience of workers is not entirely dependent on available public transport infrastructures. Instead, socio-economic factors and land-use planning play a key role in the likelihood of workers experiencing a specific mobility situation. This means that in addition to transport-related policies, improving accessibility to jobs will require policies able to reduce socioeconomic inequalities and influence the urban structure.
JH: So what are you working on these days? Will you expand this approach, add comparative views?
DLG: I currently lead a comparative research project on the governance of urban spatial structure in Mexico City, São Paulo, and Buenos Aires. The project examines how shifting spatial patterns influence job accessibility and commuting experiences across these three major Latin American megalopolises. Building on the methodology developed in my first book, my aim is to refine and apply this approach through a comparative lens. This time, however, I’m not working alone. The research is based at the Urban Structure Lab at UIC, where I collaborate with an exceptional team of faculty and graduate students. In addition, I co-lead the LAC-US Urban Structure Research Network—a consortium of researchers from 12 universities across Latin America dedicated to generating empirical evidence on the evolution of urban spatial structures in the region’s metropolitan areas.
Photographs included in this essay were taken by Joseph Heathcott in Mexico City between 2016 and 2019.