The Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) is pleased to welcome Flávia Leite as the Pollman Fellow in Real Estate and Urban Development for the 2026–2027 academic year.
The Pollman Fellowship, established in 2002 through a gift from Harold A. Pollman, is awarded annually by the Department of Urban Planning and Design to an outstanding postdoctoral researcher in real estate, urban planning, and development. The fellow spends one year in residence at the GSD as a visiting scholar and lecturer.
Focused on the intersection of housing policy, real estate, and urban governance in the Americas, Leite’s research follows two lines of inquiry. First, she examines how housing policy shapes urban inequality along lines of class, race, and gender as seen in patterns of wealth building, affordability, and debt burden. Second, she explores how municipalities finance and govern urban infrastructure and public goods, tracing how instruments such as land value capture and public-private partnerships allocate risks and costs between households, private actors, and the state, and what that means for equity and public accountability.
Leite is a researcher at the Getúlio Vargas Foundation (FGV-Cidades) and a fellow at the Institute for Applied Economic Research (IPEA) in Brazil. She holds a PhD in city and regional planning from the University of California, Berkeley; a master’s degree in public and urban policy from the New School for Social Research, and a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of São Paulo.
