Laura Schmahmann

Welcome! I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning at Texas A&M University.

My research examines how contemporary industrial and technological shifts reshape inequality, focusing on who benefits from new forms of investment and who bears their costs. I am especially interested in how employment is distributed across regions, how industrial facilities and infrastructure are sited, and how these patterns reproduce or challenge long-standing forms of uneven development. This work combines spatial analysis, original data collection, and qualitative case studies to trace where jobs and facilities locate, how their impacts are distributed, and what this means for access to opportunity.

A central strand of my work analyzes the spatial organization of employment and regional economic change. I have examined how remote work has reshaped urban economic activity in the wake of the Covid‑19 pandemic using anonymized mobility data. I have also studied the growth of the tech industry in San Francisco and the expansion of e‑commerce warehousing on the exurban periphery of the San Francisco Bay Area, showing how new forms of logistics and digital work reconfigure regional labor markets, concentrate benefits in urban cores, and channel lower-wage work and infrastructure burdens to outlying communities.

A second strand focuses on the governance and politics of local economic development. I investigate why cities compete to attract facilities such as warehouses and data centers, and how fiscal incentives, regulatory frameworks, and community mobilization shape siting decisions. My research on e‑commerce sales tax policy in California documents a new regional dynamic of “fiscalization of land use,” in which cities pursue point-of-sale warehouses as revenue generators despite limited local job gains. Extending this work to data centers, I examine how local officials and residents evaluate projects that promise substantial tax revenues but bring relatively few jobs and significant demands on land and infrastructure. Across these projects, I aim to inform more equitable and accountable approaches to industrial development and local public finance.

I am also involved in community-engaged research that examines how major economic shifts (driven by climate disasters, pandemics, and policy changes) affect local economies, businesses, and workers. While at the UC Berkeley Urban Displacement Project, I helped identify and develop strategies to support minority-owned businesses at risk of displacement during the Covid-19 pandemic. As a researcher at the UC Berkeley Labor Center, I contributed to a “just transition” economic development framework for Contra Costa County’s refinery communities through cross-sector collaboration. More recently, I partnered with Kerr Together’s disaster recovery efforts in Central Texas, leading an economic impact analysis of the July 4, 2025 floods on local businesses.

I completed my PhD in City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley in 2025. I also hold a Bachelor of Planning (Honours Class 1) and a Master of Philosophy (Planning and Urban Development), both from the University of New South Wales.