Diane E. Davis

The Age of Insecurity: Violence and Social Disorder in the New Latin America

ited by Klaus Bodemer, Sabine Kurtenbach, and Klaus Meschkat. (Caracas: Editorial Nueva Sociedad, 2001. Pp. 459.) NAYARI HISTORY, POLITICS, AND VIOLENCE: FROM FLOWERS TO ASH. By Philip E. Coyle. (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2001. Pp. 263.) DEL ESTRADO A LA PANTALLA: LAS IMAGENES DEL JUICIO A LOS EX COMANDANTES EN ARGENTINA. By Claudia Feld. (Madrid, Spain: Siglo Veintiuno, 2002. Pp. 154.) VIOLENCE WORKERS: POLICE TORTURERS AND MURDERERS RECON-

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 restrictions on free movement and intense scrutiny of public behavior associated with the strategy of “zero tolerance” but also suggested the criminalization of certain behaviors and made recommendations for police reform that called into question the distinction between public and private police. One of the principal consequences of its implementation was to circumscribe public access to downtown space. Stated simply, the widening of downtown’s public sphere brought a narrowing of access to it along class lines. An examination of the context in which the plan was pursued traces the Giuliani invitation to the dynamics of downtown real estate development and land-use collusion between elected officials and private developers in the name of security policy. El alza del crimen y la violencia en barrios claves rodeando el centro histórico de la Ciudad de México han limitado el acceso a los espacios públicos céntricos que antes recibían una gran parte de la vida social, comercial y política de la ciudad. En el 2002, un grupo de poderosos empresarios locales contrataron al asesor de seguridad internacional, Rudolph Giuliani para que volvieran a diseñarse medidas de seguridad que pudieran remediar los problemas del crimen de la ciudad. El plan Giuliani no solo recomendaba la restricción de la movilidad libre y escrutinio intenso del comportamiento público asociado con la “cero tolerancia” sino que también la criminalización de ciertos comportamientos y en donde se hicieron recomendaciones de reforma policiaca que cuestionan la distinción entre la policía pública y la particular. Una de las consecuencias principales de su implementación fue la forma en que se circunscriba el acceso público al espacio céntrico. Puesto simplemente, el anchar de la esfera pública del centro urbano conllevo al estrechar del acceso al mismo según líneas de clase. Un examen del contexto en el cual se prosigue en el plan traza la invitación que se le hizo a Giuliani con la dinámica del desarrollo urbano en bienes raíces y la colusión en uso de la tierra entre oficiales electos y empresarios urbanizadores en nombre de la seguridad.

Irregular Armed Forces and Their Role in Politics and State Formation: Deconstructing Armed Forces

Existing models of state formation are derived primarily from early Western European experience and are misleading when applied to those nation-states struggling to consolidate their dominion in the present period. They also oversimplify aspects of the Western European experience itself. In this volume, scholars of politics and state formation focusing on a variety of countries and time periods suggest that the early Western European model of armies’ waging war on behalf of sovereign states does not hold universally. In particular, the importance of “irregular” armed forces – militias, guerrillas, paramilitaries, mercenaries, bandits, vigilantes, police, and so on – has been seriously neglected in the literature on this subject. The case studies in this book suggest, among other things, that the creation of the nation-state as a secure political entity rests as much on “irregular” as regular armed forces. In many parts of the world, the state’s legitimacy has been extraordinarily difficult to achieve, constantly eroding or under challenge by irregular armed forces within a country’s borders. No account of modern state formation can be considered complete without attending to these irregular forces.

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.1 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 capitalist context, many Latin American scholars have found elective affinity with the argument, as evidenced in the recent tidal wave of studies on social movements by Latin Americanists.2 Basing their work primarily on analyses of Brazil, Argentina and Chile, scholars have argued that social movements help challenge the legitimacy and political power

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 alternative visions for a just, peaceful, and sustainable Jerusalem resulted in new strategies considered fundamentally different from those routinely deployed in conventional planning practice, how and why.

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 modern concepts such as citizenship, universal infrastructural access, organized resistance, and the state itself. One way to do so is to reposition these concepts as relational processes involving various actors, spaces, and temporalities rather than as essentialized objects. Such epistemological moves will shed light on the extent to which basic social needs such as the distribution of justice, the production of authority, and the regulation of class relations are not the sole terrain of the state, but negotiated relationally. The article concludes by proposing three epistemological devices – iterative comparison, ambiguous categories, and the use of hermeneutics – that can help scholars avoid the biases associated with essentialized categories.

PLANNING, POLITICS, AND URBAN MEGA-PROJECTS IN DEVELOPMENTAL CONTEXT: LESSONS FROM MEXICO CITY'S AIRPORT CONTROVERSY

ABSTRACT: 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 democratization, decentralization, and globalization; (2) conflicts between local and national authorities over the relevance of citizen participation in project development; and (3) a strong coalition of local, national, and international allies using cultural identity, historical allegiances, and geographic location to build and expand struggle against the airport. In theoretical terms, this article suggests that the historical and institutional legacies of urban and national development in Mexico have created bureaucratic ambiguities and tensions over who is most responsible for major urban mega-project development. It also concludes that planning authorities have not yet developed institutional structures and processes that can enhance government legitimacy and allow the successful implementation of mega-projects in the face of forceful opposition.

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 most innovatively, if not importantly, Sampson introduces a concern with perception into studies of the city and applies it to the phenomenon of segregation, both income and race-based. By so doing, he extends the role of perception and cognition beyond the domain of subjective urban experience, a subarea of study already well-developed in the work of the urban sociologist Claude Fischer. Sampson argues provocatively that perceptions of social disorder are central to the reproduction of neighborhood composition and urban socio-spatial form. Above and beyond his fascinating findings about the race-linked interpretive biases that drive individuals to perceive greater social disorder in certain neighborhoods than actual empirical evidence would dictate, Sampson’s research will bring the discipline of urban sociology more in line with recent innovations in brain and cognitive science that are changing the way many established fields are coming to understand individual thought and behavior.

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 materialize. It further argues that informality serves as an under-explored but critical analytical point of departure for theorizing governance, citizenship, and social order. The article concludes with some thoughts on state theory and how informality provides a lens for conceiving of governance as a system of practices that link citizens, states, and markets, in turn providing a new way of categorizing similarities and differences across various state and developmental contexts.

Reflections on the relations between development and urbanization: past trajectories and future challenges

ABSTRACT This article examines the inter-relationship between economic prosperity and the growth of cities, tracing the field from its original preoccupation with over-urbanization and under-development in the 1950s and 1960s to its current fixation on dynamic global cities with redeveloped property markets that showcase new forms of wealth creation. The historical change in emphasis chronicled here is understood to be a combined product of three different causalities. The first is the shift from industrialization to financial and other services as the principal source of wealth creation in the post-1980s era. The second is the changing territorial scale of accumulation, reflected in the shifting importance of global markets vis-à-vis national markets and in the increasingly key mediating role that cities play in facilitating this transition. The third is the rescaling of state power, seen not just in terms of decentralization but also in the declining capacities of national states to discipline global investors in an era of intensifying economic liberalization. The entry ends with a discussion of the emergent social and spatial problems that accompany these shifts, ranging from the rise of urban informality to dispossession and displacement to newfound struggles over urban property rights.