She is Professor of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research explores urbanisation and the reconfiguration of spatial segregation and social discrimination, primarily in cities of the Global South, with a particular focus on Brazil. She has studied the relationship between urban form and political transformation, particularly in the context of democratisation, and has focused on how fear of violence and disregard for citizens’ rights intertwine with urban change to produce a pattern of urban segregation based on fortified enclaves. She is the author of City of Walls: Crime, Segregation and Citizenship in São Paulo (University of California Press, 2000), Democracy and Walls: New Articulations of the Public (CCCB, 2008) and numerous articles, including ‘Peripheral Urbanization – Autoconstruction, Transversal Logics and Politics in Cities of the Global South’ (Society & Space, 35(1), 2017). Together with Gautam Bhan and Edgar Pieterse, she is co-curator of the CCCB research project An Urban Interregnum, which explores emerging phenomena in cities of the Global South.