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“Citisphere” Keynote Speakers

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). 

Dr. Luís Bettencourt is a Research Scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and a Research Professor at the Santa Fe Institute.  His research interests center on the structure and dynamics of diverse complex phenomena, ranging from the emergence and spread of diseases to the social dynamics of innovation and discovery.  His work on cities investigates how rates of innovation, wealth creation, crime, or disease incidence scale with city size, identifying common “laws” in such relationships and suggesting implications for the growth and sustainability of human communities.  Dr. Bettencourt holds a Licenciatura in Engineering Physics from the Instituto Superior Tecníco in Lisbon, Portugal and a Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from Imperial College, University of London.  He has held postdoctoral positions at Heidelberg University, MIT, and Los Alamos National Laboratory.  His work on “Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities” has been highlighted by Scientific American, New Scientist, Harvard Business Review, and the premier scientific journal Nature.  Dr. Bettencourt also consults for the U. S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science and Technology Information about scientific innovation and discovery.

“Citisphere” Workshop Leader

Mr. James Rojas  is an urban planner and the co-founder of the Latino Urban Forum (LUF). LUF focuses on promoting safer, more vibrant Latino communities by enhancing public spaces, drawing on Mr. Rojas’ research on unequal access to urban amenities including parks, sidewalks, and safe crossings. He also studies Latino cultural influence on urban design. He has worked as a transportation planner at the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority and holds a Master of City Planning and Master of Science Architecture Studies from MIT. Mr. Rojas leads workshops that draw out citizens’ own solutions to urban planning problems and that highlight the diverse planning priorities of various groups. These playful workshops involve construction of cities out of found objects – blocks, buttons, bottlecaps – transforming “junk” into organized and beautiful structures. A photograph of one of these cities is the signature image of the 14^th Annual Environmental Affairs Symposium, and Mr. Rojas will lead a workshop to kick off the Symposium.