Diane Davis: Urban Resilience in Situations of Chronic Violence

Urban resilience in situations of chronic violence is the concept the sociologist Diane Davis, a professor of urbanism at Harvard's Graduate School of Design, developed in the report Urban Resilience in Situations of Chronic Violence (2012), led from MIT for the US development agency, which carried the vocabulary of natural disasters into a different problem: cities where violence is not an episode but a permanent condition that reorganises space, economy and trust. Her thesis is that communities living under chronic violence develop capacities of adaptation and resistance, and that urban policy can strengthen or destroy them depending on how it governs territory, services and the relationship among state, citizens and armed actors.

Chronic versus episodic violence: when normal is the violence

Davis distinguishes chronic from episodic violence. An earthquake or an attack has a before and an after; the violence of gangs, drug trafficking, abusive police or land conflicts lasts for years, settles in specific neighbourhoods and reshapes daily life: routes avoided, hours shortened, shops closed, young people kept indoors. Faced with that condition, resilience cannot mean returning to normal, because normal is the violence, but the capacity of communities to sustain collective life, protect their members and negotiate with those who wield force, whether the state or whoever replaces it.

Eight cities, from Medellín to Karachi: where resilience comes from

The report draws on eight cities, Medellín, Ciudad Juárez, Mexico City, Managua, Kingston, Johannesburg, Nairobi and Karachi, and finds common patterns. Resilience arises from neighbourhood organisations, churches, traders and women's networks that create safe spaces, mediate with gangs and demand services; it is strengthened when the state invests in violent neighbourhoods with transport, schools and public space rather than police alone, as Medellín did with its cable cars and libraries; and it weakens when security is privatised, when the state withdraws or when indiscriminate repression breaks trust between residents and authorities. Chronic violence, Davis shows, is also a problem of land governance.

Governance and fragmented sovereignty: Urban Leviathan and after

Governance is the axis. Davis argues that the most resilient cities are those with coordination among levels of government, the private sector, civil society and communities, and where legitimacy is built through everyday state presence rather than raids. Her earlier work, Urban Leviathan (1994), on twentieth-century Mexico City, already showed how the state governs through the city and loses control when it abandons parts of it; her later studies on fragmented sovereignty in Latin America explain how cartels and militias occupy the space the state leaves, and why a military response without territorial policy rarely works.

Influence and criticism: resilience without excusing the state

The framework has influenced the citizen security agendas of international agencies and programmes such as Colombia's social urbanism, and it has also drawn criticism: resilience can become an excuse for the state to let communities absorb a violence it should eliminate, and celebrating the adaptive capacity of poor neighbourhoods can normalise their situation. Davis shares that caution and replies that resilience is a starting point, what communities already do, and not a substitute for the state's obligation to guarantee security with justice.

Diane Davis's lesson is that chronic violence is fought with city: with services, public space, transport and legitimate state presence in the neighbourhoods where force has replaced politics, and with recognition of the neighbourhood networks that sustain life when nobody else does. A city that answers only with police and walls produces more fragmentation; one that invests in violent territories and governs with their residents can turn neighbourhood resilience into the basis of lasting peace.