Janice Perlman
Dr. Janice Perlman is an internationally recognized expert on urbanization and informal settlements. Her book, Favela: Four Decades of Living on the Edge in Rio de Janeiro (Oxford University Press, 2010) won the 2010 PROSE Award for best book of the year. The book is based on a longitudinal panel study of migrants and squatters over four generations. For this research, Dr. Perlman received a Guggenheim, two consecutive Fulbright Fellowships, and grants from The World Bank, The Tinker Foundation and The Ford Foundation. Her earlier book, The Myth of Marginality (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1976) won the C. Wright Mills Award and changed thinking about informal communities worldwide. Since its release, the book has been translated into over a dozen other languages. In 1987 Prof. Perlman founded The Mega-Cities Project; a global non-profit designed to shorten the lag time between ideas and implementation in urban problem solving. Mega-Cities has identified, nurtured and transferred hundreds of scalable innovations among communities in the world’s largest cities. Perlman received the Global Citizens Award for this work. Perlman was a tenured professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley, and has taught at numerous universities throughout the world. Perlman holds a BA in Anthropology and Latin American Studies from Cornell University and a Ph.D. in Political Science and Urban Studies from MIT.
