Introduction

Diane E. Davis is the Charles Dyer Norton Professor of Regional Planning and Urbanism and former Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design (UPD) at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Before to moving to the GSD in 2011, Davis served as the head of the International Development Group in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she also had a term as Associate Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning. In addition to her continued teaching in UPD, and her membership on the GSD's two doctoral degree commmittees, she is Project Director of the Mexican Cities Initiative. Among her other activities  at Harvard are the following; Faculty Affiliate, Bloomberg Center for Cities; Executive and Steering Committee Member at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs; Executive Committee Member at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, where she also co-heads the Rockefeller Center's Faculty Committee on Mexico; Faculty Affiliate at Harvard's Center for the Environment; and Faculty Affiliate at the Asia Center. In the past year she was named a Fellow (2023-2028) by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), which also is funder the Project "Humanity's Urban Future," of which Davis is a co-Director. This is a five year project involved a team of 10 global scholars examining Mexico City, Kolkata, Shanghai, Kinshasa, Naples, and Toronto. Davis is also a member of the "Strengthening Communities for the Energy Transition" team which received three year funding from Harvard's Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability. Trained as a sociologist, Davis’ research interests include the relations between urbanization and national development, comparative urban governance, sociospatial practice in conflict cities, new territorial manifestations of sovereignty, urban violence, the governance of risk, and strategies for resilience in the face of precarity.