Urban Informality – Marginal or Mainstream?

In this lecture, Janice Perlman discusses urban informality against the background of 40 years of research in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. The lecture lays particular emphasis on how the changes over this timespan have affected the lives of the people in the favelas. She concludes by introducing the Mega-Cities project strategy to ‘shorten the lag time between ideas and implementation’ in urban problem solving.Janice Perlman is an independent scholar and the founder and president of the Mega-Cities Project, a transnational non-profit dedicated to shortening the lag time between ideas and implementation in urban problem solving. She is now developing Mega-Cities/Mega-Change, or MC2 with the next generation of urban leaders and technologies. Her recent book, FAVELA: Four Decades of Living on the Edge in Rio de Janeiro (OUP) won two PROSE Awards, consecutive Fulbright Fellowships and a Guggenheim. Her seminal book, The Myth of Marginality (UC Press), won the C. Wright Mills Award. She was the first recipient of the Chester Rapkin Award. A former Professor of City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley, Perlman has taught at Columbia, NYU, Trinity, the University of Paris, and the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. She was Coordinator of the Neighborhoods Task Force of the National Urban Policy; Director of Strategic Planning for the NYC Partnership; and Director of Science, Technology and Public Policy at the New York Academy of Sciences.