Teresa Caldeira is Professor and Chair of City and Regional Planning at the College of Environmental Design, and an affiliate of the Department of Geography and Global Metropolitan Studies program. She received her Bachelor of Arts in Social Sciences and Master of Arts in Political Science at the University of São Paulo in Brazil, and went on to receive her PhD in Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley.

A majority of Professor Caldeira’s research focuses on predicaments of urbanization, such as spatial segregation, social discrimination, and the uses of public space in cities of the global south. She has been studying the relationships between urban form and political transformation, particularly in the context of democratization. Her work is interdisciplinary, combining methodologies, theories, and approaches from the different social sciences, the humanities, and the design disciplines. She has been especially concerned with reshaping ethnographic methods for the study of cities. Professor Caldeira’s three current research projects seek to investigate new formations of urban life and city space as they intersect with new technologies of the public, new forms of governance, and new paradigms of urban planning.