Mexico City’s pandemic urban crisis management lacked a multiscalar approach

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. This study looks at policies and programs chronologically in Mexico City in response to COVID-19 at different governance levels. It found that the crisis management programs did not succeed in establishing a multiscalar decision-making process, and proximate scales such as the domestic space or the neighborhood were ignored.