Diane E Davis
Biographic Data
| ID | 3587258 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Diane E Davis |
| GIVEN NAMES | Diane E |
| FAMILY NAME | Davis |
| SIGNATURE | DAVIS D E |
| AFFILIATIONS | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 77 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 317 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 69 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 8 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1978 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Deconstructing sovereignty: (Non-)Life, Territorial Power and the Everyday Ecologies of Hybrid Governance
This special issue explores the territorial logics of competing sovereignties and their impacts on social and material infrastructure, deployment of violence and the politico-ecological transformation of bare life, livelihoods and terrain. Although sovereign regimes may aspire to monopolise violence and cultivate legitimacy, such projects are often incomplete or highly contested. Territorial sovereignty, however, continues to be a strong fiction …
Promoting the sustainable development goals in North American cities: Case studies & best practices in the science of sustainability indicators , edited by David B. Abraham and Seema D. Iyer
Promoting the sustainable development goals in North American cities: Case studies & best practices in the science of sustainability indicators, edited by David B. Abraham and Seema D. Iyer." Journal of Urban Affairs, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp. 1–2
The Routinization of Violence in Latin America: Ethnographic Revelations
This essay reviews the following works:In Harm’s Way: the Dynamics of Urban Violence. By Javier Auyero and María Fernanda Berti. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015. Pp. xi + 239. 26.95 paper. ISBN: 9780813565439
Out of the Heart of Darkness, Yet Relegated to the Shadows: Reflections on Janet Abu‐Lughod’s Scholarly Contributions 1
This essay is part of a special section entitled “Legacies of Sociology’s Past.” It addresses the contributions of Janet Abu‐Lughod
City, Nation, Network: Shifting Territorialities of Sovereignty and Urban Violence in Latin America
Cities across the global south are seeing unprecedented levels of violence that generate intense risks and vulnerability. Such problems are often experienced most viscerally among poorer residents, thus reinforcing longstanding socio-spatial conditions of exclusion, inequality, and reduced quality of life for those most exposed to urban violence. Frequently, these problems are understood through the lens of poverty, informality, and limited emplo…
Implementing a Progressive Urban Agenda Through Social Housing: The Mismatches of Scale
This paper examines a public housing project conceived with a progressive commitment to socio-spatial inclusion in Bogota. With a focus on comprehensive planning goals, implementation processes, urban design features, and resident reactions, we show how and why the project’s form and function failed to address inhabitants’ livability concerns. After tracing this outcome to a mismatch between city-wide policy goals and neighbourhood-level actions,…
Collective Property Rights and Social Citizenship: Recent Trends in Urban Latin America
This article argues that efforts to implement collective property ownership via community land trusts (CLTs) in Latin America can be seen as a viable means for reducing socio-spatial inequalities, strengthening the urban poor’s ‘right to the city,’ and enabling more substantive social citizenship. It begins by arguing that, in Latin America, market models intended to strengthen individual property rights can increase urban inequality and spatial …
Housing What's Next?: From Thinking The Unit to Building The City
Over the course of the 20th century the worlds population grew more than during any other period in history, increasing from around 1.5 billion people in 1900 to nearly seven billion people today. Given this exponential growth, it is essential to reflect o n what we have done to house this growing populationor what residents have done to procure housing on their own. According to the numbers, we have been capable of building enough housing to com…
Reflections on “The Politics of Informality”: What We Know, How We Got There, and Where We Might Head Next
S andra C. M endiola G arcía . Street Democracy: Vendors, Violence, and Public Space in Late Twentieth-Century Mexico
Democracy, street vending, violence, and public space are well-addressed themes in the literature on twentieth-century Mexico. In addition to my own account (Diane E. Davis, Urban Leviathan: Mexico City in the Twentieth Century [1994]), among the best works in this regard are books from John Lear (Workers, Neighbors, and Citizens: The Revolution in Mexico City [2001]), Pablo Piccato (City of Suspects: Crime in Mexico City, 1900–1931 [2001]), and …
Violence, Fragmented Sovereignty, and Declining State Capacity: Rethinking the Legacies of Developmental Statism in Mexico
Informality and state theory: Some concluding remarks
Building on the comparative insights of this monograph issue's contributors, this article offers a theoretical research agenda intended to transcend dichotomization and developmental divides. It argues that instead of a priori ascribing an undesirable normative character to informality, its presence should be seen as an opportunity for understanding the conditions under which multiple forms of claims-making, democracy, and justice will materializ…
Introduction: A processual approach to informalization
This introduction briefly reviews the intertwinement of 'informality' and 'modernization' and their implications for the theory and practice of the city. The editors identify the importance of recognizing uneven processes of informalization, emphasizing the need to compare the quality of state-citizen-market relations more than the quantity of 'informality.' In the process they ask whether and how informal and formal practices can help to rethink…
Cities in Latin America
Urban Latin America has changed dramatically over the latter half of the twentieth century. From 1950 to 1980 Latin American cities showcased high rates of migrant absorption, overurbanization, and national state domination of local politics and decision‐making. Urban growth concentrated in a few cities, reinforcing conditions of primacy and growing demands for urban servicing to meet the needs of an industrial economy primed for national economi…
Development and Urbanization
Modernist Planning and the Foundations of Urban Violence in Latin America
Planning, Politics, and Urban Mega-Projects in Developmental Context: Lessons from Mexico City’s Airport Controversy
Using a focus on a failed airport project for Mexico City, this article explores the conditions that enable and constrain urban mega-project development in countries facing simultaneous political and economic transition. The article argues that the Mexico City airport project faced three major obstacles, each inspired by citizen efforts to influence planning decisions: (1) divisions within and between the political class and citizens, driven by d…
Zero-Tolerance Policing, Stealth Real Estate Development, and the Transformation of Public Space: Evidence from Mexico City
Rising criminality and violence in key neighborhoods surrounding Mexico City's historic center have limited easy access to downtown public spaces that used to host much of the city's social, commercial, and political life. In 2002 a group of powerful local businessmen hired the international security consultant Rudolph Giuliani to design security measures that might remedy the city's crime problems. The Giuliani plan not only called for restricti…
Political Power and Social Theory
As economic stagnation freezes the globe; capitalism is increasingly questioned; war, revolution and political instability unsettles the Middle East; and President Obamas campaign for the Presidency looms, Volume 23 of Political Power and Social Theory reflects on these and related issues. Chapters in this volume discuss the meaning of revolution, the origins of neoliberalism in India, identity formation in a Chicago social movement, the Palestin…
Cities in Latin America
While the idea of what constitutes Latin America is relatively imprecise and continues to be defined by geographic correlates and cultural assumptions embedded in the history and power politics of the Americas, this entry will address the large cities of Spanish‐ and Portuguese‐speaking Central and South America, as well as Mexico. Today these regions are among the most urbanized in the world, making them an important site for the study of the wo…
Building Globalization: Transnational Architecture Production in Urban China
The Right to Vision: A New Planning Praxis for Conflict Cities
Building on Henri Lefebvre’s work on the role of imagination in crafting socially just urban conditions and “rights to the city,” this paper asks whether new ideas and urban practices can be produced through the use of experimental visioning techniques. Using empirical evidence drawn from an ideas competition for Jerusalem, one of the world’s most intractable conflict cities, the paper considers the extent to which the global call to create alter…
Political Power and Social Theory
Violent Acts and Urban Space in Contemporary Tel Aviv: Revisioning Moments
Violent acts over the past fifteen years have profoundly altered civil rituals, cultural identity, and the meaning of place in Tel Aviv. Three events in particular have shed light on the global rule of urban space in the struggle for territory, resources, and power: the assassination of Prime Minister Rabin in 1995 in the city council square; the suicidal bombing at the Dolphinarium Discothèque along the shoreline in 2001; and bombings in the Nev…
Irregular armed forces, shifting patterns of commitment, and fragmented sovereignty in the developing world
Non-State Armed Actors, New Imagined Communities, and Shifting Patterns of Sovereignty and Insecurity in the Modern World
In a world of growing security challenges, non-state armed actors have captured significant attention from scholars concerned with regime stability and the consolidation of national states. But the preoccupation with national political dynamics has eclipsed the study of non-state armed actors who struggle to secure economic dominion, and whose activities reveal alternative networks of power, authority, independence, and self-governance unfolding …
Irregular armed forces, shifting patterns of commitment, and fragmented sovereignty in the developing world
Undermining the Rule of Law: Democratization and the Dark Side of Police Reform in Mexico
This article asks whether democratization, under certain historical conditions, may relate to the deteriorating rule of law. Focusing on Mexico City, where police corruption is significant, this study argues that the institutionalized legacies of police power inherited from Mexico's one-party system have severely constrained its newly democratic state's efforts to reform the police. Mexico's democratic transition has created an environment of par…
The power of distance: Re-theorizing social movements in Latin America
Introduction: A processual approach to informalization
This introduction briefly reviews the intertwinement of 'informality' and 'modernization' and their implications for the theory and practice of the city. The editors identify the importance of recognizing uneven processes of informalization, emphasizing the need to compare the quality of state-citizen-market relations more than the quantity of 'informality.' In the process they ask whether and how informal and formal practices can help to rethink…
Zero-Tolerance Policing, Stealth Real Estate Development, and the Transformation of Public Space: Evidence from Mexico City
Rising criminality and violence in key neighborhoods surrounding Mexico City's historic center have limited easy access to downtown public spaces that used to host much of the city's social, commercial, and political life. In 2002 a group of powerful local businessmen hired the international security consultant Rudolph Giuliani to design security measures that might remedy the city's crime problems. The Giuliani plan not only called for restricti…
Informality and state theory: Some concluding remarks
Building on the comparative insights of this monograph issue's contributors, this article offers a theoretical research agenda intended to transcend dichotomization and developmental divides. It argues that instead of a priori ascribing an undesirable normative character to informality, its presence should be seen as an opportunity for understanding the conditions under which multiple forms of claims-making, democracy, and justice will materializ…
Cities in Global Context: A Brief Intellectual History
Social Movements in the Mexico City Airport Controversy: Globalization, Democracy, and the Power of Distance
How did a relatively small group of uneducated peasants organize a movement to halt a huge national project to build a showcase airport outside Mexico City? This article applies the power of distance model, an analytic perspective for understanding social movement origins and successes based on an understanding of state-society relations, to the mobilization by indigenous peasants against the proposed Texcoco airport. The power of distance perspe…
Reflections on “The Politics of Informality”: What We Know, How We Got There, and Where We Might Head Next
Planning, Politics, and Urban Mega-Projects in Developmental Context: Lessons from Mexico City’s Airport Controversy
Using a focus on a failed airport project for Mexico City, this article explores the conditions that enable and constrain urban mega-project development in countries facing simultaneous political and economic transition. The article argues that the Mexico City airport project faced three major obstacles, each inspired by citizen efforts to influence planning decisions: (1) divisions within and between the political class and citizens, driven by d…
The Public Accountability of Private Police: Lessons from New York, Johannesburg, and Mexico City
The accountability of public police has been well documented. The role and function of internal affairs divisions, civilian review boards, the media, and criminal and civil courts has been explored in many works. The same cannot be said about their private counterparts. Since the beginning of the 1970s, the global community has witnessed a surge in the number of and the reliance upon private police forces. Yet, empirical knowledge about their fun…
The Social Construction of Mexico City: Political Conflict and Urban Development, 1950-1966
The Dialectic of Autonomy: State, Class, and Economic Crisis in Mexico, 1958-1982
Does the causal relationship between economic crisis and greater state autonomy so widely accepted in the advanced capitalist context hold for Latin America and, in particular, for Mexico? Despite ongoing debates over the bases of state autonomy and its political or theoretical implications, the claim that fiscal crisis facilitates greater autonomy is one of the few propositions to generate relative consensus from both state-centered and classcen…
Rethinking Democracy: Mexico in Historical Perspective
Since Robert Dahl's seminal writings on democracy more than two decades ago, interest in the topic has emerged again, especially among scholars analyzing democratic transitions. Great strides have been made in revealing the uncertain nature of these transitions (O'Donnell et al. 1986; Malloy and Seligson 1987; Diamond, Linz, and Lipset 1989; Hakim and Lowenthal 1991; O'Donnell 1994), in methodologically analyzing them as contested and 'crafted' r…
The Routinization of Violence in Latin America: Ethnographic Revelations
This essay reviews the following works:In Harm’s Way: the Dynamics of Urban Violence. By Javier Auyero and María Fernanda Berti. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015. Pp. xi + 239. 26.95 paper. ISBN: 9780813565439
Building Globalization: Transnational Architecture Production in Urban China
Divided over Democracy: The Embeddedness of State and Class Conflicts in Contemporary Mexico
Reputational Standing in Academe
Taking place and space seriously: Reflections on 'Disparity and Diversity in the Contemporary City
Rob Sampson's ‘Disparity and Diversity in the Contemporary City’ establishes two very critical points for sociologists generally, and for scholars of the city in particular. First and foremost, it highlights the importance of individual perception, a form of cognitive processing, as a key determinant in social outcomes. While not entirely new, this claim is in need of serious re-consideration and further discussion in sociology today. Second and …
The Taylorized Beauty of the Mechanical: Scientific Management and the Rise of Modernist Architecture
Whither the Public Sphere: Local, National, and International Influences on the Planning of Downtown Mexico City, 1910-1950
This article examines the practices of urban planners in the early decades of this century as a basis for thinking about the public sphere in Mexico. It offers a general description of downtown Mexico City, its physical and social character, and the foreign and domestic reference points used to build the city in the period of revolutionary transition when competing views about downtown changed the profession of planning and the city itself. The a…
Failed Democratic Reform in Contemporary Mexico: From Social Movements to the State and Back Again
Over the last decade or so, North American and European scholars have popularised a research focus on new social movements, or so-called autonomous and democratic struggles generated from within civil society against the state. The underlying theoretical premise of this approach is that challenges to the state from social movements are a principal driving force of political change in modern society. Despite its grounding in the advanced capitalis…
Deconstructing sovereignty: (Non-)Life, Territorial Power and the Everyday Ecologies of Hybrid Governance
This special issue explores the territorial logics of competing sovereignties and their impacts on social and material infrastructure, deployment of violence and the politico-ecological transformation of bare life, livelihoods and terrain. Although sovereign regimes may aspire to monopolise violence and cultivate legitimacy, such projects are often incomplete or highly contested. Territorial sovereignty, however, continues to be a strong fiction …
Collective Property Rights and Social Citizenship: Recent Trends in Urban Latin America
This article argues that efforts to implement collective property ownership via community land trusts (CLTs) in Latin America can be seen as a viable means for reducing socio-spatial inequalities, strengthening the urban poor’s ‘right to the city,’ and enabling more substantive social citizenship. It begins by arguing that, in Latin America, market models intended to strengthen individual property rights can increase urban inequality and spatial …
Development and the Tourist Industry in Third World Countries
Tourism is viewed as a rapidly growing foundation of the economy in many developing nations. This paper provides an analysis of the dependent nature and structural duality of the tourist industry in Third World countries. It is argued that the principal consequences are inter and intraclass fragmentation and the exacerbation of regional disparity, which in turn impede national development. The major theoretical emphasis is on the role of the tert…
Migration, rank-size distribution, and economic development: The case of Mexico
Reputational Standing in Academe
Protesta social y cambio político en México
Debts, doubts, and disciplines
Divided over Democracy: The Embeddedness of State and Class Conflicts in Contemporary Mexico
Urban Fiscal Crisis and Political Change in Mexico City: From Global Origins to Local Effects
Using Mexico City as a case study, this paper examines the unique problems and constraints that contribute to urban fiscal and political crisis in cities in developing countries. The recent international debt crisis and Mexico’s history of dependent development accelerated the fiscal insolvency of Mexico City and limited local capacity to generate new or alternative revenue sources. Metropolitan authorities have limited maneuvering room to addres…
Urban Transport, Dependent Development and Change: Lessons from a Case Study of Mexico City's Subway
From a case study of the 1965 decision to build Mexico City's subway and the conflicts it engendered between 1964 and 1976, we see the political origins and developmental effects of mass rapid transit in LDC's. The paper validates basic premises of the political economy perspective; but instead of situating the subway policy's implementation in the context of interclass conflicts between capital and labor, it shows that cross-class alliances, int…
Unlearning Languages of Development: From Rhetoric to Realism in Recent Studies of Latin America
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The Dialectic of Autonomy: State, Class, and Economic Crisis in Mexico, 1958-1982
Does the causal relationship between economic crisis and greater state autonomy so widely accepted in the advanced capitalist context hold for Latin America and, in particular, for Mexico? Despite ongoing debates over the bases of state autonomy and its political or theoretical implications, the claim that fiscal crisis facilitates greater autonomy is one of the few propositions to generate relative consensus from both state-centered and classcen…
Crisis fiscal urbana y los cambios políticos en la ciudad de México: Desde Los Orígenes Globales a Los Efectos Locales
Este artículo utiliza el caso de la Ciudad de México como ejemplo para analizar los problemas y limitaciones que contribuyen a agudizar los conflictos políticos y fiscales urbanos en las ciudades de países en vías de desarrollo. La reciente crisis de la deuda externa y el desarrollo (que en México históricamente se ha basado en la dependencia), aceleraron la insolvencia fiscal en la cual se encuentra el Distrito Federal y limitaron la capacidad q…
Democracy within Reason: Technocratic Revolution in Mexico
Failed Democratic Reform in Contemporary Mexico: From Social Movements to the State and Back Again
Over the last decade or so, North American and European scholars have popularised a research focus on new social movements, or so-called autonomous and democratic struggles generated from within civil society against the state. The underlying theoretical premise of this approach is that challenges to the state from social movements are a principal driving force of political change in modern society. Despite its grounding in the advanced capitalis…
Urban Leviathian: Mexico City in the Twentieth Century
Africa, Asia, and Latin America
Political Power and Social Theory, Vol. 9
Urban Leviathan: Mexico City in the Twentieth Century
Rethinking Democracy: Mexico in Historical Perspective
Since Robert Dahl's seminal writings on democracy more than two decades ago, interest in the topic has emerged again, especially among scholars analyzing democratic transitions. Great strides have been made in revealing the uncertain nature of these transitions (O'Donnell et al. 1986; Malloy and Seligson 1987; Diamond, Linz, and Lipset 1989; Hakim and Lowenthal 1991; O'Donnell 1994), in methodologically analyzing them as contested and 'crafted' r…
The Social Construction of Mexico City: Political Conflict and Urban Development, 1950-1966
Political Power and Social Theory, Vol. 11
Informal Politics: Street Vendors and the State in Mexico City
Political Power and Social Theory, Vol. 12
The power of distance: Re-theorizing social movements in Latin America
The Left Strikes Back: Class Conflict in Latin America in the Age of Neoliberalism
Introduction: Ten Theses on Latin America Resistance, Pragmatism, and Alternatives * Latin America: The Left Strikes Back * Intellectuals: A Marxist Critique of Post-Marxists * Pragmatism Unarmed, with Steve Vieux * Perspectives for Liberation: The Ambiguous Legacy Elections and Extraparliamentary Politics * Alternatives to Neoliberalism * Neoliberal Political Cycles The United States and Latin America * Liberalization and U.S. Global Strategy, w…
Political Power and Social Theory
This volume of "Political Power and Social Theory" deliberately grapples with some of the weightiest subjects in the contemporary social sciences: race and class and their impact on political and economic organization. Three historical papers on Cuba, Tanzania, and Mexico open the volume by exploring the complex relations between race, class, ethnicity, and nationalism. Two subsequent papers, which draw on the contemporary case studies of Chile a…
Political science (65 works) · Sociology (53 works) · Law (50 works) · Politics (43 works) · Economics (26 works) · Political economy (25 works) · Law (23 works) · Geography (17 works) · Latin Americans (14 works) · Democracy (12 works)