Anthropologist and social scientist, Professor of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work explores predicaments of urbanization and reconfigurations of spatial segregation and social discrimination, mostly in cities of the global south, especially in Brazil.  She has studied the relationships between urban form and political transformation, particularly in the context of democratization, focusing on how fear of violence and disrespect of citizenship rights intertwine with urban changes to produce a pattern of urban segregation based on fortified enclaves. She is author of City of Walls: Crime, Segregation and Citizenship in Sao Paulo (University of California Press, 2000), Democracy and Walls: New Articulations of the Public (CCCB, 2008) and many articles, including "Peripheral Urbanization – Autoconstruction, Transversal Logics and Politics in Cities of the Global South" (Society&Space 35(1), 2017).