Dr. Janice Perlman

Founder & President

Dr. Perlman is a research scholar, author, speaker and consultant. Her most recent book, Favela: Four Decades of Living on the Edge in Rio de Janeiro (OUP, 2010), traces the life histories of hundreds of urban migrants and their families over four generations. It is a follow-up to her seminal book, The Myth of Marginality (UC Press, 1976) that contested prevailing stereotypes about migrants and shantytowns and discredited the policies of eradication by favela removal.

She is the founder and President of The Mega-Cities Project; a global non-profit designed to “shorten the lag time between ideas and implementation in urban problem solving”. For her work and publications she has won a Guggenheim, the C Wright Mills Award, the Chester Rapkin Award, two publishers’ PROSE Awards and a Global Citizens Award.

She was a tenured Professor of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley and has since taught at NYU, Trinity College and several Brazilian Universities. She was Director of Strategic Planning for the NYC Partnership; Director of Science, Technology and Public Policy at the New York Academy of Sciences; and Coordinator of the Neighborhood Task Force of the National Urban Policy. Her BA is in Anthropology from Cornell and her PhD is in Political Science and Urban Studies from MIT.

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