Institutionalizing Privilege: Governance, Mobility Regimes, and Urban Space in Mexico City

• In Event: Governing Space

Abstract

As remote work expands globally, digital nomadism has emerged as a key force reshaping urban space, with Mexico City positioned prominently within contemporary mobility circuits. Rather than arising solely from lifestyle preferences or market demand, the concentration of remote workers is structured by institutional arrangements that selectively make affordability, cultural vibrancy, and infrastructure accessible to mobile professionals. While digital nomads generate demand for co-working spaces, cafés, and platform-based services, their settlement intensifies questions of governance, social integration, and neighborhood change. Drawing on 30 semi-structured interviews and participant observation conducted in Roma, Condesa, and Polanco in 2024, this paper analyzes how digital nomads’ everyday practices intersect with mobility regimes, platform infrastructures, and urban policy gaps to reshape neighborhood space and belonging. Rather than conceptualizing digital nomadism as a lifestyle or cultural trend, the paper frames it as a governance outcome produced through selective flexibility, including permissive visa enforcement, platform-mediated housing access, and public–private partnerships that prioritize transnational investment over resident stability. These arrangements enable digital nomads-predominantly from the Global North-to access housing and urban amenities while remaining partially insulated from local labor markets, tax regimes, and accountability mechanisms. Governance power thus operates not through exclusion, but through uneven inclusion that redistributes risk and precarity onto long-term residents. Findings show that platformized housing markets and ambiguous migration status accelerate transnational gentrification by reorienting residential neighborhoods toward transient consumption. At the same time, everyday encounters between nomads and residents reveal how moral boundaries of legitimacy and belonging are negotiated in public space along racialized and classed lines. By foregrounding governance as a mechanism through which power produces space, this paper contributes to urban sociology and global urbanism by showing how mobility regimes institutionalize privilege and deepen urban inequality in a Global South metropolis.

Author

• Olivia C. Sanchez, University of California-San Diego