Irene Farah

Welcome! I am an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) Department of Urban and Regional Planning, with an appointment at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). My research bridges political science and urban planning, examining how political relationships across levels of government and the organizational networks that mediate them shape urban governance, resource allocation, and the management of informal processes in cities.

Through comparative research in Mexico City and San Francisco, I study how political intermediation and bureaucratic coordination shape the governance of informal urban processes, revealing the durability or fragility of governance patterns across regime transitions and institutional reforms. My work combines qualitative interviews with computational spatial analysis, including location-based services data, satellite imagery, and spatial econometrics.

Before my doctoral studies, I worked at the Center for Spatial Data Science at the University of Chicago and at Mexico’s National Council for Social Development Policy Evaluation (CONEVAL).

Education

• Ph.D., City and Regional Planning, University of California, UC Berkeley
• M.A., Social Sciences, University of Chicago
• B.A., Political Science, Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM)

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