I am a scholar of cities, their political practices and formations of collective life. My research focuses on predicaments of urbanization and reconfigurations of spatial segregation and social discrimination, mostly in cities of the global south. My current research investigates new formations of collective life especially in the peripheries of these cities. I have been interested in studying the relationships between urban form and political transformation, particularly in the context of democratization. I have also investigated the ways in which fear of violence and disrespect of citizenship rights intertwine with urban transformations to produce a pattern of urban segregation based on fortified enclaves. I have always worked in an interdisciplinary manner, combining methodologies, theories, and approaches from the different social sciences, and have been exploring how to reshape ethnographic methods for the study of cities.

I am currently Professor of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley, and hold the Carmel P. Friesen Chair in Urban Studies. I am also an affiliated faculty at the departments of Geography, Anthropology, and Gender & Women’s Studies, at the Program of Global Metropolitan Studies, and at the Center for Latin America & Caribbean Studies.

I was educated at the University of São Paulo (B.A. in Social Sciences and M.A in Political Science) and at the University of California, Berkeley (Ph.D. in Anthropology). I worked as a professor and researcher in the Brazilian university system between 1980 and 1996. I was a researcher at Cebrap (Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning), one of Brazil's most important research centers in the social sciences, for 15 years. I was also a professor at Unicamp’s Department of Anthropology between 1988 and 1996, when I joined the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. I became a member of UC Berkeley Department of City and Regional Planning in 2007. I am currently a research affiliate at NEV – USP (Núcleo de Estudos da Violência da Universidade de São Paulo).

For more on my work, see Research