About
Longstanding research interests include the relations between urbanization and national development, urban governance, and urban social movements, with a special emphasis on cities of the global south and Mexico in particular. Current projects focus on conflict cities, urban violence and spatial strategies to minimize risk and foster resilience in the face of intensified urban vulnerabilities, including climate change. The latter includes new funded research on water struggles set in motion by urbanization, and strategies to repurpose work, livelihoods, and communities in cities and regions destabilized by the energy transition. These and other projects on sustainable mobility and urban environmental governance have funded by the Volvo Research and Educational Foundations, the UK-Mexico Climate Change Pact, and the Toronto-based Urban Economy Forum.
Awards
- Remarkable Women in Transportation Award. April 2019. Named one of top 50 women in research on transport by the German Development Agency/Transforming Urban Mobility Initiative (TUMI)
- Starr Family Prize for Excellence in Advising, Harvard College, June 2018
- Outstanding Author Contribution Award Winner, Emerald Literati Network Awards for Excellence 2014, for “How to Defeat a Megaproject: Lessons from Mexico City’s Airport Controversy” in Gerardo del Cerro Santamaria (ed.) Urban Megaprojects: A Worldwide View, Emerald Ltd, 2013
- Bernard Brodie Prize (2010) for Best Article of the Year in for “Non-State Armed Actors, New Imagined Communities, and Shifting Patterns of Sovereignty and Security in the Modern World,” Contemporary Security Policy, vol. 30 no. 2 (August):221-245
- Best Book in Political Sociology [Discipline and Development: Middle Classes and Prosperity in East Asia and Latin America, Cambridge University Press, 2004]. Awarded by the Section on Political Sociology, American Sociological Association, July 2005
Relevant Publications
- Transforming Urban Transport (Oxford University Press, 2018)
- Cities and Sovereignty: Identity Conflicts in the Urban Realm (Indiana University Press, 2011)
- Urban Leviathan: Mexico City in the Twentieth Century (Temple University Press 1994; Spanish translation 1999