Diane Davis-DCRP/IURD Lecture

Professor Davis will discuss the relations between modernist planning and violence in Latin America. This lecture will assess past decisions in building Latin American cities and look at the planning action/policy implications of those decisions. Diane E. Davis is the Charles Dyer Norton Professor of Regional Development and Urbanism and Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design at Harvard's Graduate School of Design. Before to moving to the GSD in 2012, Davis served as the head of the International Development Group in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT, where she was Associate Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning. She started her teaching career in Sociology and History at the New School for Social Research. Trained as a sociologist, Davis's research interests include the relations between urbanization and national development, comparative international development, socio-spatial practice in conflict cities, and new territorial manifestations of sovereignty. Her books include Urban Leviathan: Mexico City in the Twentieth Century (Temple University Press 1994; Spanish translation 1999), Discipline and Development: Middle Classes and Prosperity in East Asia and Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2004; named the ASA's 2005 Best Book in Political Sociology), Irregular Armed Forces and their Role in Politics and State Formation (Cambridge University Press, 2003) and Cities and Sovereignty: Identity Conflicts in the Urban Realm (Indiana University Press, 2011). Davis also is the author of Urban Resilience in Situations of Chronic Violence, prepared for USAID, which examines the coping and adapting strategies adopted by citizens and authorities to push back against violence in seven cities around the world. Currently she is co-PI of a three year project funded by Mexico's national workers' housing agency (INFONAVIT) focused on developing more sustainable social housing policies for Mexican cities. Founder and curator of the Mexican Cities Initiative at Harvard's GSD, Davis is Chair of the David Rockefeller Center's Faculty Committee on Mexico, and is a contributing editor for the US Library of Congress, Handbook of Latin American Studies (Sociology: Mexico). She has served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Planning Education and Research, City and Community, and the Journal of Latin American Studies.