Janice Perlman is currently a Senior Research Scholar at Columbia University. She is the Founder and President of The Mega-Cities Project: Innovations for Urban Life, a global non-profit network designed to shorten the lag time between ideas and implementation in urban problem solving. Perlman’s most recent book, Favela: Four Decades of Living on the Edge in Rio de Janeiro is based on her longitudinal study tracing changes over four generations in Rio’s favelas. She first lived in the favelas in 1968-’69 and challenged prevailing stereotypes with her first book, The Myth of Marginality. She was formerly a professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, and has received many major awards, including a Guggenheim, the C Wright Mills Award, the Chester Rapkin Award, the American Publishers’ PROSE Award and the Global Citizens Award.