Diane Davis

Davis starts from a situation that does not fit the textbooks: in many Latin American, African and Middle Eastern cities there are zones the state does not control, where the rules are set by a gang, a militia, an armed group or a private security firm. This is not an absence of order but another order, with its own taxes, punishments and services.

Her concept of urban resilience therefore departs from the usual usage. It is not about recovering from an earthquake or a flood, events with a beginning and an end, but about living for decades with constant violence that reorganises daily life: where you can walk, at what hour, which streets to cross and whom to pay. Davis argues that purely policing responses fail because they treat the symptom and usually strengthen the armed actor.

An American sociologist, Davis is professor of urbanism and development at Harvard's Graduate School of Design, and previously led MIT's international development programme for years. She began by studying Mexico: Urban Leviathan (1994) is a political history of twentieth-century Mexico City and of how the ruling party administered its growth.

Her later work has compared Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, Medellín, Kabul and Baghdad to understand what distinguishes the cities that manage to recover public space from those that do not. Her conclusion is that what matters is not the force deployed but legitimacy: where the municipality delivers reliable, recognisable services, the armed actor loses the function that sustained it.