Environmental Studies

Events

Environmental Affairs Symposium - Keynote Presentation

Date: October 11 2011 8:00pm - 9:00pm Location: Agnes Flanagan Chapel - Agnes Flanagan Chapel

The Urban Century: Cities, Mega-Cities, and Urban Innovation

 

Dr. Janice Perlman is the Founder and President of the Mega-Cities Project, a non-profit organization geared toward sharing innovative solutions to problems common to cities with over 10 million people.  The Mega-Cities Project’s goal is “to shorten the time lag between ideas and implementation through experiential learning, collective creation of new knowledge, and preparing the next generation of urban leaders.”  The organization’s personal network-based approach to disseminating and scaling up local solutions has been adopted by UN-Habitat as an Urban Best Practice.  Dr. Perlman earned a B.A. from Cornell University in Anthropology and Latin American Studies and a Ph.D. from MIT in Political Science.  She was a professor of City and Regional Planning at University of California, Berkeley before founding the Mega-Cities Project.  She also coordinated an Inter-Agency Task Force on National Urban Policy under President Carter; served as Executive Director of Strategic Planning for the New York City Partnership; and acted as Senior Advisor to the World Bank’s Urban Projects Department.  She is the author of The Myth of Marginality: Urban Poverty and Politics in Rio de Janeiro (University of California Press), winner of the C. Wright Mills Award.  Dr. Perlman received Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships to complete her latest book, Favela: Four Decades of Living on the Edge in Rio de Janeiro (Oxford University Press).