Roberta Mendonca De Carvalho

Roberta Mendonça De Carvalho is a Teaching Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the University of Pittsburgh's Urban Studies Program. She is also affiliated faculty at the Center for Latin American Studies and the Center for Global Studies, Coordinator of the Amazonian Studies Program, and an International Associate Researcher with the Laboratório de Estudos Geopolíticos da Amazônia Legal (LEGAL) in Brazil.

Born and raised in Belém, one of the largest cities in the Brazilian Amazon, De Carvalho is an urban geographer whose research examines urbanization as a global process and the ways it takes distinctive forms across places and scales. The Brazilian Amazon is a central geographic focus of her work and a critical site for investigating broader questions about urban growth, territorial transformation, environmental change, inequality, and sustainability. Her interdisciplinary research bridges urban geography, environmental studies, and regional development, drawing on GIS, remote sensing, spatial analysis, and comparative and multiscalar approaches.

Her current research focuses on Amazonian urbanization, including territorial and municipal fragmentation, urban expansion and deforestation, urban vegetation and ecosystem services, environmental justice, and the relationships among infrastructure, resource economies, and urban development. Her work challenges persistent representations of the Amazon as a predominantly rural or wilderness region by foregrounding the cities, urban networks, and political and economic processes that increasingly shape the forest and its future.

De Carvalho's scholarship includes "Green Forest, Gray Cities in the Amazon" in Ecology of Tropical Cities (Springer Nature, 2025), "Urban Vegetation Loss and Ecosystem Services: The Influence on Climate Regulation and Noise and Air Pollution" in Environmental Pollution, and contributions to Imperiled: The Encyclopedia of Conservation (Elsevier). Her research has also examined the rapid expansion and institutional fragmentation of the Amazonian urban system, as well as the relationships among hydropower infrastructure, industrial development, and urbanization.

At Pitt, De Carvalho teaches courses in urban studies, sustainability, and urban and regional development, including Introduction to Urban Studies, Urban Sustainability, Amazonian Cities, and the Urban Research Seminar. Her teaching connects urban theory to contemporary urban challenges through comparative cases, field-based learning, collaborative research, and applied projects. She developed Amazonian Cities, a distinctive interdisciplinary course that examines the Amazon through the lens of urbanization. To her knowledge, it is among the very few university courses specifically organized around the urban Amazon and the role of urbanization in transforming the region. The course challenges conventional representations of the Amazon as primarily forest or rural territory and instead treats its cities and urban networks as fundamental to understanding the region's contemporary social, environmental, economic, and territorial transformations. Through this perspective, students explore the relationships among cities, forests, infrastructure, culture, development, inequality, and environmental change in one of the world's most consequential regions.

Before entering academia, De Carvalho worked across government, private-sector, and civil-society organizations in Brazil on environmental policy, local development, and international cooperation. She holds a PhD in Geography from the University of Florida, an MA in Management of Natural Resources and Local Development in the Amazon from the Federal University of Pará, and a BA in Business Administration.