Laura Dallabrida Leite e Silva

Laura Dallabrida is currently completing a Master in City Planning at MIT DUSP as a Lemann Fellow and Ling Fellow. Her work sits at the intersection of spatial justice, equitable infrastructure, urban governance and climate finance, with a focus on informal settlements in the Global South. 

Before MIT, Laura served as Urban Planning Coordinator at the City of São Paulo's Housing Secretariat, where she led large-scale upgrading and environmental restoration projects delivering water, sanitation, adequate housing, and land tenure regularization across environmentally vulnerable favelas. She holds a bachelor's degree in Architecture and Urbanism from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), where her award-winning thesis examined self-managed water infrastructure and territorial autonomy among Quilombola communities in the Ribeira valley, Brazil.  

At MIT, she co-founded The Majority City - MIT Urban Informality Research Group, Territorio - MIT Latin American Urban Policy Association, and co-leads the Langa Food Sovereignty Network, a community-based urban farming project in Langa township, Cape Town, South Africa - recipient of the MIT Climate Project Student Innovator Award and part of the Sandbox 2026 cohort.