Zaire Dinzey-Flores’ research focuses on understanding how urban space mediates community life and social inequality. Dinzey-Flores uses an interdisciplinary lens (sociology, urban planning, public policy), mixed-method approaches, and often a comparative Caribbean-U.S. framework, to investigate the processes that cement the built environment and unequally distribute power. She is particularly interested in housing and urban residential (housing and neighborhood) design: the underlying logics and policies that drive design, how design is interpreted, used, and experienced, and the consequences for communities and residents of cities. Dinzey-Flores has published articles on public housing policy and design in Puerto Rico, race and class segregation and inequality in Puerto Rico, reggaetón music and culture as an urban phenomenon, and what it means to acknowledge Latinos in the urban intellectual history of the United States. 

Dinzey-Flores is currently working on her first book, tentatively titled Locked In, Locked Out: Gated Communities of the Rich and Poor in a Puerto Rican City, which attends to questions of race, class, and gender inequality as they are recreated and contained in and negotiated through the physical built environment, and particularly through the use of community gates in private and public housing enclaves in Puerto Rico. The book examines community gates as a product that, similar to the historical use of cages and fences, has been differentially applied and managed by and for different communities, designed to keep some people and communities out and/or in. The book investigates community gates’ aesthetic and technological aspects, the kinds of ideals contained and sought through their erections, and the complex ways in they marshal, control, or empower communities of differing social and economic conditions.