New speakers will be added as they are confirmed.
Kevin Alexander
Senior Planner, City of Windsor Planning Department
Kevin Alexander is a Senior Planner with the City of Windsor Planning Department in Windsor Ontario. Kevin has a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Urban Planning from the University of Windsor and Masters in Urban Planning Degree, and Graduate Certificate in Economic Development from Wayne State University . He has worked in the United States and Canada in both the private and public sectors as an Urban Planner. Kevin joined the Planning Department in 2000 and specializes in community development and design and was instrumental in developing a Heritage Conservation District and Community Improvement Plan with economic incentive programs for the Sandwich Town neighbourhood in the City of Windsor. He has conducted several walking tours of neighbourhoods throughout the City of Windsor. Kevin works with other Planners, Architects and designers towards the adaptive re-use of buildings to attract people and create a sense of place.
John Anderson
Principal, Anderson|Kim Architecture + Urban Design
R. John Anderson, CNU is a co-founder and principal for Anderson|Kim Architecture + Urban Design. He has a very diverse experience beginning with a practical foundation in the construction trades, advancing through design and development practice in public and private roles. He thrives in the problem solving and troubleshooting environment of charrettes, and the rigor of coding, entitlement and building. He can triage conventional building schemes and demonstrate the financial benefits of sustainable urbanism to private developers and municipalities in their own terms. John leads the planning and urban design work of the firm.
Kent Anderson
Architect, KH ANDERSON PC
Kent Anderson's contributions to planning and design for Detroit’s downtown, districts and neighborhoods span over thirty years, with work that has earned over 50 professional design awards for civic landscapes, community planning, waterfront development and downtown planning. Honors include recognition by Michigan State University’s School of Landscape Architecture as a distinguished alumnus, AIA Detroit for exemplary accomplishments in urban design and AIA Michigan for outstanding contributions to the allied arts of the architecture profession. His hands-on knowledge of intertwined political, cultural and physical issues for designing in Detroit offers a unique perspective on the city’s downtown and what it can become moving forward.
Monte Anderson
CEO/President, Options Real Estate Investments, Inc.
Monte Anderson is the President of Options Real Estate a multi-service real estate company specializing in creating sustainable neighborhoods in southern Dallas and northern Ellis counties in Texas. Mr. Anderson began his real estate career in 1984 and since that time has concentrated solely on improving the living and working environments in these communities. His company developed Main Station, the first mixed-use development in Duncanville, Texas. He is also responsible for the renovation of the historic Belmont Hotel, a 68-room boutique hotel, café and spa located in the Trinity River Corridor of Dallas, which was the recipient of Preservation Dallas and Preservation Texas awards. His most recent development is a 131-acre mixed-use, traditional neighborhood development currently under construction in Midlothian, Texas & he has just received the CLIDE Award. Mr. Anderson is the recipient of numerous awards and honors for his community involvement. He currently serves on the board of directors for the North Texas Chapter of CNU and was its founding president.
Samantha Armbruster
Main Street Program Manager, City of San Marcos
Samantha Armbruster is a Main Street Program Manager that has a knack for programming remarkable events and campaigns. Previously owner of a Social Media Marketing company, she is currently the Main Street Program Manager for the City of San Marcos. In two and a half years, Samantha has increased the downtown event attendance 337% while heightening the awareness of the town center through on and offline campaigns. She is currently working to create a citizen-driven work plan that drives placemaking and artistic initiatives downtown while advocating for local business. Samantha earned her Business: Management Information Systems degree from University of West Florida in 2002 and M.V.P. award from Texas Roller Derby in 2008.
Ashley Atkinson
Co-Director, Keep Growing Detroit
Ashley Atkinson is a Co-Director at Keep Growing Detroit. She also serves as the sustainable agriculture representative for the Detroit Food Policy Council and as an Advisor to organizations including the Great Lakes Bioneers, Fitness Works Detroit, and Grow Dat youth farm in New Orleans. Ashley is a graduate of both Michigan State University and the University of Michigan where she studied International Development, Community Organization, and Environmental/Land Use Planning. In 2012, she was one of ten young people selected by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to receive their Young Leaders in Health award in celebration of the foundation’s 40th Anniversary.
T.J. Auer
Community Planner, Ford City Neighborhood Renewal
T.J. Auer, Community Planner with the Ford City Neighborhood Renewal, is an import to Windsor originally from Waterloo. He came to Windsor to complete his Bachelor’s degree in Political Science and in the meantime grew to love the City. He can often be heard referring to Windsor as the City of Hidden Treasures. T.J. went on to Wayne State University for his Master’s in Urban and Regional Planning concentrating in Economic Development. He has worked on projects with both the Detroit and Michigan Economic Development Corporations and works to bring systems level approaches to the neighborhood scale. T.J. is a strong believer that planning and long term economic conditions are inextricably linked and these two neighborhoods demonstrate this concept well. We must plan for longevity despite the pressures of immediacy.
Mallory Baches
Urban Designer, The Civic Hub, The Civic Hub
Mallory Baches A.I.C.P. LEED-AP CNU-A is an urban designer and civic specialist. She focuses her professional practice on the intersection of urban design and community development, exploring the relationship between the quality of physical realm and the strength of civic engagement, involvement, and investment. Mallory holds a B-Arch professional degree from the University of Notre Dame. She is accredited with the American Planning Association (AICP), the U.S. Green Building Council (LEED), and the Congress for New Urbanism (CNU-A). She was named a member of the 2013 Next Urban Vanguard class by Next City, is the current Past-President of the Association for Community Design, is a member of the Placemaking Leadership Council of the Project for Public Spaces, and is an active member of the Carolinas Chapter of the CNU. She has been profiled on the Design Feast series Designer Quest(ionnaire) and on NextCity.
Peter Baird
Senior Planner, Perkins + Will
Peter Baird is a senior planner at Perkins + Will, with an experience in city planning and urban design from the UK, New Zealand and, currently, Austin Texas. Peter sits as an elected member of the Austin Pedestrian Advisory Council and chair of the Technical Subcommittee. The Pedestrian Advisory Council (PAC) advises the City of Austin on pedestrian planning, design, and education issues. Their work helps promote a safe, active and engaging public realm for all.
Erin Barnes
Executive Director/Co-Founder, ioby
Erin Barnes is the co-founder and executive director of ioby, a nonprofit crowdfunding platform for positive neighborhood change. Using ioby’s online platform and offline services, citizen leaders have raised more than $2.5 million in small donations to make neighborhoods stronger and more sustainable. Prior to founding ioby, Erin covered climate change and other environmental issues as a journalist and editor, and was a community organizer around wild salmon and natural resources in the Pacific Northwest. Erin holds an MA in environmental management from Yale, and a BA in English and American Studies from the University of Virginia. She serves on the Board of EcoDistricts, and the Steering Committee for EPIP-NYC. She was the recipient of The Rockefeller Foundation’s 2012 Jane Jacobs Medal for New Technology and Innovation.
Mateo Barnstone
Managing Director, CNU Central Texas
An attorney by trade, Mateo Barnstone is the Managing Director for The Congress for the New Urbanism Central Texas Chapter. Mateo also serves on the Evolve Austin board and is a volunteer with Reconnect Austin. He is active in the new urbanist community, Mueller in Austin, Texas, on the Mueller Neighborhood Association and has been a resident representative on the town center working group and the Berkman working group.
Kate Beebe
President, Katherine Beebe & Associates
Kate Beebe works as a consultant for developers, investors, real estate-owning corporations and government. Her focus is on creating reinvestment strategies for pubic/private partnership-financed urban development projects. Principal Detroit project experience includes Orchestra Place, Lower Woodward Reinvestment Project , Eastern Market and the Dequindre Cut. Her work aims at leveraging public and private investment to create viable places within the urban environment. Formerly head of the Detroit Downtown Partnership and the developer and initial President of the nonprofit Eastern Market Corporation, Kate’s work frequently starts with formulation of a reinvestment strategy and results in implementation.
Kaid Benfield
Senior Counsel for Environmental Strategies, Placemakers
Kaid Benfield is one of the nation’s foremost authorities on how cities, towns and neighborhoods can better work — for both people and the environment. A longtime leader of the smart growth movement, he served for two decades as director of the smart growth and sustainable communities programs at the Natural Resources Defense Council, driving positive, forward-thinking approaches to environmental challenges in the places where Americans live, work, and play. He co-founded LEED for Neighborhood Development, a national process for defining and certifying smart, green land development, and is a founder and board member of Smart Growth America.
Robin Bergstrom
Executive Director, CNU New England
Robin Bergstrom became CNU New England's first Executive Director in March 2014, after serving for three years on its Board of Directors. Prior to this, she worked for Fort Point Associates, a Boston-based planning & consulting firm specializing in the Massachusetts environmental regulatory system. With two urban design firms -- Town Planning & Urban Design Collaborative and B. Dennis Town & Building Design -- she contributed to community-based design charrettes across New England, as well as in Texas and Tennessee. Through her studies and lifelong interest in geography and philosophy, she has cultivated a special appreciation for the the cultures, landscapes, and quirky political systems that characterize New England and New Englanders.
Scott Bernstein
President, Center for Neighborhood Technology
Scott Bernstein is the president and co-founder of the Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT). Scott leads CNT’s work to understand and better disclose the economic value of resource use in urban communities, and helps craft strategies to capture the value of this efficiency productively and locally. He studied at Northwestern University, served on the research staff of its Center for Urban Affairs, taught at UCLA and was a founding board member at the Brookings Institution Metropolitan Center. President Clinton appointed Scott to the President’s Council for Sustainable Development, where he co-chaired its task forces on Metropolitan Sustainable Communities and on Cross-Cutting Climate Strategies and to other Federal advisory panels on global warming, development strategy, and science policy. He helped write a climate change strategy for the 1st 100 days of the new Administration.
Vinayak Bharne
Director of Design, Moule & Polyzoides Architects and Urbanists
Vinayak Bharne is Director of Design at Moule & Polyzoides Architects and Urbanists in Pasadena, California, were he has led many of the firm’s award-winning commissions, most recently the downtown revitalization in Lancaster, CA, that won the 2013 United States Environmental Protection Agency’s National Award for Smart Growth Overall Achievement. He is a joint adjunct professor of urbanism at the Price School of Public Policy and the School of Architecture at the University of Southern California where he formerly held the Presidential Fellowship at the USC Marshall School of Business. He is the editor of "The Emerging Asian City: Concomitant Urbanities & Urbanisms,” a 24-chapter volume on the phenomenological forces shaping Asian cities, and author of two books – “Zen Spaces & Neon Places: Reflections on Japanese Architecture and Urbanism” and “Rediscovering the Hindu Temple: The Sacred Architecture & Urbanism of India”. He currently serves as Executive Editor of the quarterly “My Liveable City” in Mumbai, India, and on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Architecture & Urbanism in London, UK.
Howard Blackson
Urban Design & Community Planning Manager, RBF Consulting, a Company of Michael Baker International
A national leader in crafting innovative urban design techniques and form-based codes for cities and towns for over 20-years, Howard Blackson is a principal and Director of Planning for PlaceMakers, LLC, a new economy collaboration of seven (7) principles with no central office or staff. He has designed and managed a variety of projects both internationally and in the United States having worked in Singapore, South Korea, and throughout North America. Howard holds a Master degree in Urban Design from the University of Westminster, London, and a Bachelor degree in Geography from the University of Texas at Austin. He is an Accredited Member of the Congress for the New Urbanism and is a member of the U.S. General Services Administration Design Excellence Peer Review Committee. Howard is a lecturer at San Diego’s NewSchool of Architecture and Design and University of California San Diego.
Hazel Borys
Managing Principal, PlaceMakers
Hazel Borys is Managing Principal and President of PlaceMakers, an urban design, coding, and place-based marketing firm located throughout the US and Western Canada. She guides governments through land use law reforms — allowing walkable, mixed-use, compact, resilient places to develop by-right — and helps developers get things built under the increasingly prevalent form-based codes of the new economy. Hazel is an electrical engineer with an MBA. She is the organizer of the Placemaking@Work webinar education series and the SmartCode Workshop, board member of the Transect Codes Council, coauthor of the Codes Study, and blogger on PlaceShakers.
Patrick Braga
Student, Cornell University
Patrick Braga is a fourth-year undergraduate student at Cornell University majoring in Urban and Regional Studies, Music, and Economics. He is currently a visiting student at the University of Oxford. Patrick has previously presented research on walkability at CNU 22 (Buffalo) and on transit and equity at CNU 23 (Dallas). He has worked with form-based coding, comprehensive planning, and transportation planning, and will be working with affordable housing development this summer. Patrick is currently writing an opera about Le Corbusier.
David Brain
Professor of Sociology and Environmental Studies, New College of Florida
Professor Brain’s research and teaching interests focus on the connections between place-making, community-building, and civic engagement, and on sociological issues related to the planning and design of good neighborhoods, humane cities, and sustainable development at the regional scale. In addition to research and theoretical writing on these topics, his work has led to practical involvements that include both independent consulting and neighborhood-oriented action research that engages students in collaboration with local community groups. Locally, he and his students have worked with city and county government as well as neighborhood and community groups. He has been recognized internationally as an expert on contemporary efforts to transform the way cities are built, and as a frequent contributor to educational programs for citizens and professional practitioners— in collaboration with the Florida House Institute for Sustainable Development, the Seaside Institute, the Seaside Pienza Institute for Town Building and Land Stewardship, the Knight Program in Community Building, and the Catanese Center for Urban and Environmental Solutions.
Gary Brewer
Partner, Robert A.M. Stern Architects
Gary L. Brewer joined Robert A.M. Stern Architects in 1989 and has been a Partner in the firm since 2008. His responsibilities have involved the design and administration of various institutional, hospitality, and residential projects. He is co-author of the monograph Designs for Living: Houses by Robert A.M. Stern Architects (Monacelli, 2014). Mr. Brewer's university work includes the Darden School of Business Administration at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia; the Spangler Campus Center at the Harvard Business School, Boston, Massachusetts; the renovation and expansion of Ozark Hall at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville; the Ernest F. Hollings National Advocacy Center and West Campus Residence Quadrangle at the University of South Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina; and the Fitness and Aquatics Center at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island.
Eric Brown
Principal, Brown Design Studio
Eric is a Savannah-based architect who works in New Urbanist places across the US. While he works in a broad range of building types, he is best known for his attached unit types such as Main Street buildings and townhouses. His practice focuses on traditional architecture in new construction, urban infill and historic preservation/re-use. He also has significant experience in Smart Code/Form-Based Code calibration, product planning, land planning and infill/sprawl repair design as well as community land planning and town center urban design.
Shaunna K. Burbidge
President, Active Planning
Dr. Burbidge received her PhD from the University of California, Santa Barbara in Geography emphasizing Transportation Studies in 2008. She holds an M.A. from that same program and two undergraduate degrees from Weber State University (Ogden, Utah) in History and Geography-with an emphasis in urban planning. Her background as a behavioral scientist has allowed her to work extensively in travel behavior data analysis and travel survey development, also utilizing her technical specialization in econometrics and multivariate modeling. Her current research foci include modeling the connections between the built environment and public health, active modes of transportation (walking and biking), and behavioral influences on active mode choice for members of different demographic subgroups (i.e. children, baby-boomers, low income, etc.). In addition to her research work, Shaunna has worked in a broad range of planning fields. In addition to her planning and research experience, she has technical experience drafting Environmental Impact Statements for a number of transportation projects in the Western U.S., conducting survey analysis for UC Berkeley’s Partners for Advanced Transit and Highways (PATH), and as a former Project Manager for Envision Utah (a public-private partnership specializing in urban/regional planning). She is currently the only consultant in Utah nationally certified to conduct Health Impact Assessments. Shaunna currently serves as an article reviewer for multiple journals and recently served as a co-editor updating the Transportation Research Board’s Travel Survey Methods Manual. Dr. Burbidge is a member of the Travel Behavior and Values committee of the Transportation Research Board (National Academies of Science) and currently serves as a special advisor to the CDC’s Office of Sustainability and the National Center for Environmental Health’s Public Health and Built Environment Initiative. In the local community she is a member of the Utah Partnership for a Healthy Weight where she serves as a member of the Research Council. She is also a member and former chair of the Active Community Environments Workgroup of the Utah Department of Health. She has previously held positions as an Assistant Professor of Geography at Brigham Young University, and as a Research Professor in both the City and Metropolitan Planning and Health Promotion and Education departments at the University of Utah. She is also a regular Environmental Health lecturer at the University of Utah School of Medicine.
Christopher Calott
Robert and Millicent Lalanne Chair of Real Estate Development, Architecture & Urbanism, University of California, Berkeley, College of Environmental Design
Chris Calott is an award-winning architect, urban designer, academic and real estate developer. In 1998, he established CALOTT + GIFFORD Architecture / Urban Design and later founded the closely-aligned real estate partnership INFILL SOLUTIONS: Innovative Urban Design and Development in order to facilitate the design and development of forward-thinking urban solutions. Together, his two firms have been responsible for creating progressive regional urban typologies in mixed-use urban housing, dense infill developments, affordable housing, transit-oriented developments, and vibrant public plazas principally in the Southwest, often working with urban Native American populations and traditional Hispanic communities in the region. Fast Company magazine recognized Calott’s award-winning design and real estate development practice in 2011 as one of the “50 brilliant urbanites helping to build the cities of America’s future”.
Daniel Carmody
President, Eastern Market Corporation
A thirty five-year career in downtown and neighborhood revitalization began in Rock Island, IL where Dan grew Renaissance Rock Island into one of the Midwest’s leading community-based development organizations. Since 2007 Carmody has served as President of Detroit’s Eastern Market Corporation (EMC) where he leads the non-profit charged with transforming one of Detroit’s most venerable institutions into the nation’s most inclusive, convivial, resilient, and robust regional food hub.
Ross Chapin
Principal, Ross Chapin Architects
Ross Chapin, FAIA, is an architect, neighborhood planner and author based near Seattle, WA. He is a passionate advocate for pocket neighborhoods, a term he coined for small groupings of households around shared commons, which he sees as building blocks for vibrant and resilient communities. Since 1997, Ross has designed and partnered in developing seven pocket neighborhoods and has designed dozens of communities for developers across North America, many of which have received international media coverage, professional peer review and national design awards. Ross’s work and ideas have been featured in more than 40 books and in numerous publications including the New York Times, USA Today, AARP Bulletin, Forbes, Planning Magazine, Architectural Record and Professional Builder. Ross’s own book, Pocket Neighborhoods: Creating Small Scale Community in a Large Scale World, has been widely read, shifting the thinking of homebuyers, architects, developers and policy makers.
Jessica Cheung
Architect and Urban Designer, nARCHITECTS
Jessica Cheung is a Registered Architect in Hong Kong (HKIA). She gained her first Master Degree of Architecture from The Chinese University of Hong Kong. After practicing in both Hong Kong and China, she pursued her second Master degree in Architecture and Urban Design from The Columbia University of New York. She is now currently working as design architect in nARCHITECTS, PLLC, New York.
Tzu Yi Chuang
Architect and Urban Designer, GRO Architects
Tzu Yi Chuang is an architect and urban designre, born in Taiwan, he currently resides in New York. He received her degrees for the National Cheng Kung University and Columbia University. In his work he focuses on issues of housing and resilience in dense urban environments. He is currently practicing as an architect at GRO Architects, PLLC.
Samantha Chundur
Associate, Calthorpe Associates
Samantha Chundur, AICP, LEED AP is a designer and planner with over 11 years experience in architecture, planning and urban design. Her interests include sustainability and the effect of transportation, culture and the vernacular on urbanism. She brings to Calthorpe Associates her knowledge of sustainable systems and her varied work experience. Her work ranges from international master plans, regional planning, policy planning to neighborhood design and design guidelines. She has represented the firm at design workshops, both internationally and domestically.
Laura Clemons
founder & CEO, Collaborative Communities
Laura Clemons, founder and CEO, heads up a team of professionals with expertise in a variety of areas. She serves as the company’s head project team leader. Laura is a LEED Accredited Professional with a specialty designation in Building Design and Construction and has been working in the sustainable built environment since her return to Alabama in 2008. Laura uses a combination of her unique educational and professional experiences to create, implement and fully execute varied programs with refinement and precision.
Carol Coletta
Senior Fellow, American Cities Practice, Kresge Foundation
Carol Coletta is a senior fellow with The Kresge Foundation’s American Cities Practice. She is leading a proposed $40 million collaboration of foundations, nonprofits and governments to demonstrate the ways in which a connected set of civic assets – a civic commons – can yield increased and more widely share prosperity for cities and neighborhoods. She formerly was vice president of Community and National Initiatives for the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. She led the two-year start-up of ArtPlace, a public-private collaboration to accelerate creative placemaking in communities across the U.S. and was president and CEO of CEOs for Cities for seven years. She also served as executive director of the Mayors’ Institute on City Design, a partnership of the National Endowment for the Arts, U.S. Conference of Mayors and American Architectural Foundation.
Mark Convington
Chairman, The Georgia Street Community Collective
Adam Cook
Principle Research & Planner, Seamless Collaborative
Adam Cook is a private sector consultant specializing in land use planning and research, urban design and economic analysis. He received his BS in Mathematics and Economics from the University of Michigan-Dearborn, and studied Urban & Regional Planning and Historic Preservation at Eastern Michigan University. Adam has made research contributions to two urban planning textbooks—Principles of Urban Retail Planning and Development by Robert Gibbs (Wiley, 2012) and Planning and Community Development: A Guide for the 21st Century by Norman Tyler and Robert M. Ward (Norton, 2010). He is also an active educator, communicating his passion for the built environment to audiences throughout Michigan comprised of elected and appointed officials, professionals, and engaged citizens. Since 2013 he has served as a certified trainer of the MiPlace Partnership Placemaking Curriculum, a six part series of courses on Place-based planning developed by a broad range of public and nonprofit sector agencies to promote Placemaking as a 21st century economic development strategy for the state of Michigan.
Michael Cooke
Manager of Planning Policy, City of Windsor
Michael is a registered professional planner with the Canadian Institute of Planners. He has worked for the City of Windsor, Ontario Planning Department for more than 25 years and currently holds the position of Manager of Planning Policy. He has held sessional positions at the University of Windsor teaching courses on housing policy and recreation planning. Michael has welcomed the opportunity to Chair the Open Streets Windsor Steering Committee which has been tasked to deliver in 2016, the city’s first ever open streets events.
Maurice Cox
Director, Planning and Development for Detroit
Maurice Cox, newly appointed Planning Director for the City of Detroit is an urban designer, architectural educator and former mayor of the City of Charlottesville, VA. He most recently served as Associate Dean for Community Engagement at Tulane University, School of Architecture and Director of the Tulane City Center, a university-affiliated practice operating at the intersection of design, urban research and civic engagement throughout the New Orleans community. Cox has taught at Syracuse University, the University of Virginia and Harvard University's Graduate School of Design. His experience merging architecture, politics and design education led to his being named one of “20 Masters of Design” in 2004 by Fast Company Business Magazine. He served as Design Director of the National Endowment for the Arts from 2007-2010 where he led the NEA’s Your Town Rural Institute, the Governor’s Institute on Community Design, the Mayors’ Institute on City Design, and oversaw direct design grants to the design community across the U.S. In 2013, Cox was named one of the Most Admired Design Educators in America in the annual ranking of Design Intelligence.
Stephen Coyle, AIA, LEEP-AP
Owner, Town-Green
Stephen Coyle, AIA, LEED AP, Town-Green and The National Charrette Institute – Steve, architect, urbanist, and planner, is founder and principal of the design firm Town-Green (www.town-green.com), and co-founder of the National Charrette Institute (NCI), a non-profit organization that trains professionals in the art and practice of collaborative planning (www.charretteinstitute.org). He and his colleagues design and repair buildings, neighborhoods and towns throughout the country and Southeast Asia. A contributing author of the Charrette Handbook, he just authored Resilient Communities: Making Places Healthy and Whole, that will be published by John Wiley & Sons. With John Anderson, Paul Crabtree, and Martin Dreiling, Steve co-founded Townworks + DPZ, a multi-disciplinary firm in collaboration with that extraordinary Miami firm. With the State of California, Steve pilots the Emerald Cities program that develops sustainable community plans for local communities.
Kenneth Craft
Principal, Craft Design Studio, LLC
Kenny Craft, founder of Craft Design Studio, specializes in residential architecture, from High End Residential, to Affordable Housing, from New Urban Neighborhoods to Historic Urban In-fill. Craft Design Studio also provides architectural services for a wide range of commercial architecture, specializing in types common to New Urban Neighborhoods, such as Live Works, Multifamily Buildings, and Mixed Use Buildings. Craft Design Studio provides Town Architect services, developing architectural standards, and upholding them through a rigorous yet customer sensitive review process.
Kenny Craft currently serves as the Director of Design for the South Main Neighborhood, in Buena Vista Colorado, a Mixed-use Traditional Neighborhood Development (TND), planned by Dover Kohl and Partners. As Director of Design, Kenny oversees all aspects of design and implementation, upholding design standards through a design review process and construction observation. Kenny has also been a Charrette team member for mixed-use developments around the country, helping to set and establish an architectural vision for the development, rooted in the local building traditions of the region.
Garrett Craig-Lucas
Student, Cornell University
Garrett Craig-Lucas is an undergraduate student in his final semester at Cornell University where he is pursuing a degree in Landscape Architecture and a minor in Urban and Regional Studies. His research focuses on urban waterfront redevelopment and, more recently, on climate adaptation strategies for these sites. Garrett has contributed to a project on Seattle’s waterfront, completed numerous studios involving the design of waterfronts, and is currently working on a design for a waterfront site in the village of Catskill, New York. Through research and practice, he hopes to continue to address issues related to climate and identity along urban waterfronts.
Lynn Crawford
Writer & Art Critic, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit
Fiction writer and art critic Lynn Crawford has lived and worked in the Detroit Metro region for over 20 years. She is a founding board member of Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD) and a 2016 Rauschenberg Literary Arts Fellow. Lynn Crawford's latest novel, Shankus & Kitto: A Saga, is forthcoming from DittoDitto, Detroit.
David Csont
Architectural Illustrator, Urban Design Associates
David is a nationally recognized illustrator and educator with over twenty years of experience in the visualization of architecture. A key member of the UDA design team, David's unique talents include the ability to translate urban design and architectural concepts into three-dimensional perspective drawings in a variety of traditional and digital media. These images become an integral part of the marketing program for each project because they can easily communicate complex ideas to a varied audience. His ability to combine a fine art sensibility with the illustration of architecture has resulted in a painterly style that is characterized by strong bold color and dynamic composition. As a member of the American Society of Architectural Illustrators (ASAI), David's work has been recognized in the juried exhibition, Architecture in Perspective, in 1989, 1996, 1998, and 2005 through 2012. He served as President of ASAI in 2007, and organized the AIP 22 Exhibition and Conference in Pittsburgh. In 2012, He was awarded the best informal Sketch category award from ASAI.
Marianne Cusato
Associate Professor of the Practice, School of Architecture, University of Notre Dame
Marianne Cusato is an expert in the fields of real estate trends and housing. Her messages speak to the ever-changing needs of homeowners striving to balance the practical requirements of economy and durability with the desire to love where we live. Cusato is renowned for her work on innovative housing solutions for disaster recovery. Her 308 s.f. Katrina Cottage design won the Smithsonian Institute’s Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum’s 2006 "People's Design Award." She has been ranked the No. 4 most influential person in the home building industry by Builder Magazine, voted one of the 30 Most Influential Women in the Housing Economy by HousingWire Magazine and selected by Fortune Magazine as one of the Top Women in Real Estate.
A spokesperson and housing expert for IAC’s HomeAdvisor (NASDAQ: IAC), Cusato leads the HomeAdvisor Insights Forums, a series of events exploring important issues affecting the homebuilding industry such as aging-in-place and residential construction labor shortages. Cusato is the author of two books: The Just Right Home: Buying, Renting, Moving...or Just Dreaming--Find Your Perfect Match! with Daniel DiClerico (April 2013, Workman Publishing) and Get Your House Right, Architectural Elements to Use and Avoid, with Ben Pentreath, Richard Sammons and Leon Krier, foreword by H.R.H. The Prince of Wales (January 2008, Sterling Publishing).
Naomi Davis
President & Founder, BIG: Blacks in Green
Devita Davison
Marketing and Communications Director, FoodLab Detroit
A native of Detroit and daughter of a preacher, Devita lived almost 19 years in New York before moving back to her hometown in 2012. For her, words are not just letters strung together; they are vessels for love and fight, heart ache, wisdom, and profound joy. To say she wears her heart on her sleeve doesn't feel adequate; whether decrying injustices in the food system or expounding on the beauty of a ripe strawberry in summer, her passion for this work is palpable. With fiery talk, wide-open arms, and an insatiable appetite for reading the latest in food justice and innovation, Devita propels the growth of FoodLab’s programming to address the transforming needs of our members.
Hank Dittmar
Director, Dittmar Associates Limited
Hank Dittmar is one of the world's leading urbanists, advising governments, companies, and communities all over the world on making cities and towns more livable, resilient and beautiful. In 2014, he stepped down as Chief Executive of The Prince's Foundation to undertake a limited number of number of high impact projects for the Foundation and on his own. Dittmar was the longest serving Chief Executive for The Prince's Foundation for Building Community, directing the growth of the unique charity in the UK and around the world, and overseeing the development of its practice based approach to education from 2005-2013. He remains a Special Advisor.
Bruce F. Donnelly
Urban Planner, Office of Bruce F. Donnelly
Bruce F. Donnelly is an urban planner based in the Cleveland, Ohio area, specializing in organizing codes and plans. He has written a chapter for the forthcoming book, The Transect, edited by Brian Falk of CATS, and has contributed a chapter to Landscape Urbanism and its Discontents, edited by Emily Talen and Andres Duany.
James Dougherty
Director of Design, Dover, Kohl & Partners Planning
James Dougherty, AICP, CNU, ASAI is the Director of Design at Dover, Kohl & Partners, in Coral Gables, Florida. James has dedicated his career to helping communities envision and implement a more walkable, sustainable future. He began working with Dover-Kohl in 1996 and has since participated in over 120 design and form-based coding charrettes in the United States and abroad. He participates in all aspects of the office's work, including public involvement, development of master plans, regulating plans and form-based codes. James works closely with the firm’s Principals, Project Directors and Urban Designers to establish the design direction of each of the office’s projects. He also specializes in the creation of three-dimensional illustrations, using a blend of hand-drawn and computer techniques. James’ graphics and visualizations illustrating sustainable urban design and form-based code principles have been published in over a dozen books. James was honored with CNU Florida's 2012 Charles A. Barrett Memorial Award for Continuing Excellence in Architecture and Urban Design. James is a member of the American Society of Architectural Illustrators and has been honored with Awards of Excellence in their Architecture in Perspective 24 & 25 jury competitions.
Scott Douglass
Architectural & Urban Designer, Principle Group
A South Coast Massachusetts native living and working in Providence Rhode Island, Scott has a Bachelor’s Degree in Architecture from the University of Miami and worked for several years at DPZ, before working as a freelance collaborator, and currently working with Principle Group In Boston.
Victor Dover, CNU-A
Principal, Dover, Kohl & Partners
Urban designer Victor Dover, FAICP, CNUa, is a charter member of CNU. As principal-in-charge of Dover, Kohl & Partners Town Planning in Coral Gables, Florida, Dover has won multiple Charter Awards, as well as the John Nolen Medal for contributions to urbanism. He was founding chair of the CNU Florida Chapter, the first of its kind. Dover served as CNU’s national board chair from 2010-2012. He is the co-author of Street Design: The Secret to Great Cities and Towns (2014).
Andrés Duany
Principal, DPZ Partners
Andrés Duany is a founding principal at Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company (DPZ). DPZ is widely recognized as a leader of the New Urbanism, an international movement that seeks to end suburban sprawl and urban disinvestment. In the years since the firm first received recognition for the design of Seaside, Florida, in 1980, DPZ has completed designs for close to 300 new towns, regional plans, and community revitalization projects. This work has exerted a significant influence on the practice and direction of urban planning and development in the United States and abroad.
Douglas Duany
Professor of the Practice, University of Notre Dame
Douglas Duany has worked on many pivotal architectural and urban projects that have put him at the forefront of his field. He received his Master's degree in Landscape Architecture from Harvard Graduate School of Design in 1990. Previous to that, he had designed and executed private landscapes as well as developing the public spaces and landscapes of Seaside. Duany has been involved in urban design projects in over 10 countries and 30 states while maintaining an intermittent landscape practice. He has taught as a visiting professor of architecture at the University of Miami and the University of Florida.
Ellen Dunham-Jones
Professor of Architecture and Urban Design, Georgia Institute of Technology
Ellen Dunham-Jones is an architect and professor of urban design at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She is co-author with June Williamson of Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs, (Wiley, 2009, 2011, 2013.) Its documentation of successful retrofits of aging big box stores, malls, and office parks into healthy and more sustainable places received a PROSE award and has been featured in The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, PBS, NPR, TED and other prominent venues. She is a CNU Fellow, lectures widely, conducts workshops and maintains the world’s only database tracking successful retrofits.
Daniel Emerine
Transportation Planner, DC Office of Planning
Dan is the Transportation Planner for the District of Columbia’s Office of Planning. He coordinates transportation and land use planning throughout the city, including reforming parking policy and implementing transit-oriented development. Dan is the project manager for several initiatives that focus on transportation, land use, and placemaking, including studies of the impacts of the planned DC Streetcar and urban design concepts for a major freeway replacement. Dan began working for OP in 2008 on the comprehensive rewrite of the District’s zoning regulations. Previously, Dan worked with the International City/County Management Association, providing assistance to local governments and researching best practices in planning and zoning. He has a Master’s of Public Management from the University of Maryland and a degree in political science from Denison University.
Wale Emmanuel
Founder, Chicago Basketball Academy
Wale Emmanuel was as an accountant at Ernst & Young, and as a senior consultant at AON Infrastructure Solutions. Emmanuel made a name for himself by helping government, developers, and community owners manage proposals and risk solutions in public-private partnership transactions and social infrastructure projects. With his resourceful economic mind, he next ventured out to found the Chicago Basketball Academy alongside former Chicago Bulls star Bill Cartwright. Cartwright is just one of the big names Emmanuel has had the honor of working with, with NBA All-Star Shawn Marion, Kanye West collaborator Malik Yusef, and former U.S Deputy Secretary of Education Dr. Michael Bakalis among his collaborators. Boasting focus on a complete, advanced education based on an immersive study of sports, the Chicago Basketball Academy acted as a blueprint for Emmanuel’s latest project: The Sports Economy School.
Stacey Epperson
President and CEO, Next Step Network
Stacey Epperson is a native of rural Kentucky and has worked in affordable housing throughout her entire career. In 2010, she assumed leadership of Next Step, a social venture that mobilizes a national network of nonprofits to provide energy-efficient, affordable housing solutions tailored to the needs of their communities. Next Step’s partnership with Clayton Homes and KIT HomeBuilders West creates a new market dynamic that makes it easier for nonprofits to fulfill their mission, and for more low-income families to achieve homeownership.
Next Step evolved from Stacey’s nine years as President and CEO of Frontier Housing in northeastern Kentucky. While there, Stacey worked to triple Frontier's total production, loan fund and net worth. As one of the nation's most respected nonprofit providers of manufactured housing and one of the NeighborWorks® Network's largest homebuilders, Stacey testified before a Senate Committee in an effort to replace pre-HUD Code mobile homes across the United States with new, energy-efficient homes.
Gerald Erion
Professor of Philosophy, Medaille College, Buffalo, NY
Jerry Erion teaches philosophy at Medaille College in Buffalo, where his scholarly interests include ethics, philosophy of mind, and critical thinking. He and his students are developing a new, experimental course on cities inspired by the work of Frederick Law Olmsted, Jane Jacobs, and Andrés Duany.
Brian Falk
Director of Publications, Center for Applied Transect Studies
Brian Falk worked as a writer and editor for ten years in Charlotte, NC, occasionally writing articles about New Urbanism and Smart Growth. From 1999-2002 he was Editorial Director of Business Properties, a magazine dedicated to the commercial development industry. He was one of the first inhabitants of First Ward Place, an early Hope VI project, where he became a committed urbanist. After completing Duke University's Nonprofit Management program, he now lives in the South Beach neighborhood, where the rural-to-urban transect was discovered.
Stephen Fan
Founding Director, s!fan designs
Stephen Fan is the curator of the award-winning exhibit, SubUrbanisms: Casino Urbanization, Chinatowns and the Contested American Landscape. Bridging both academia and practice, Stephen is the founding director of s!fan (www.stephenfan.com ), a research/design collaborative working at the intersections of architecture, art, craft, planning, and design. He has built projects on four continents, including a participatory-planning/design build project for a community devastated by the 311 Tokohu earthquake in Japan. He has lectured both nationally (Bard, Columbia GSAPP, NYU, UCLA, Van Alen Institute, Vassar, Yale) and internationally (Hong Kong University, National University of Singapore), and his work has been featured in Architectural Record, The Atlantic's City Lab, Metropolis, Next City, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Shinkenchiku, and the World Journal. He received his A.B. and M.Arch from Harvard University.
Mark Farlow
Director of Design, Hamilton Anderson Associates
Mark Farlow is the Director of Design at HAA with over 23-years of professional experience in the design and management of architecture and urban design projects. Mark assists clients in the development of design vision and strategies for implementation of projects. Active in the community, Mark served as president of the Birmingham Rotary Club and continues to speak at local schools and community groups about architecture and design. In addition, he has over 33-years of teaching experience in both undergraduate and graduate level classes in several schools of architecture.
Doug Farr, CNU-A
President and Founding Principal, Farr Associates Architecture & Urban Design
Doug Farr, AIA is the founding principal of Farr Associates, an award-winning architecture and planning firm identified by the New York Times as “the most prominent of the city’s growing cadre of ecologically sensitive architects.” Having a mission to design sustainable human environments, Farr’s niche is in applying the principles of LEED at the scale of the neighborhood and in designing green buildings exclusively for urban contexts. Farr Associates was the first firm in the world to design three LEED-Platinum buildings (Christy Webber Landscapes, the Chicago Center for Green Technology and the Center for Neighborhood Technology), which stand as models of urban architectural sustainability. Based on the firm’s pioneering sustainable design practice and his insights gained from chairing LEED-ND, Doug authored Sustainable Urbanism: Urban Design with Nature. This planning best seller visualizes Sustainable Urbanism—the growing sustainable design convergence that integrates walkable and transit-served urbanism with high-performance infrastructure and buildings—as the normal pattern of development in the United States by 2030.
Erik Ferguson
Project Engineer, Martin County Board of County Commissioners
Erik Ferguson is a professional engineer with over 16 years of engineering experience. His work experience ranges from designing major highway and bridge projects for both the New York and North Carolina Department of Transportation, to administration of the Dutchess County Public Works Department in Poughkeepsie, NY. For the past six years Erik has worked as a project engineer with Martin County focusing on traffic signal, traffic calming and intersection improvements. Erik brings an interest in cost effectively creating a sustainable transportation system. Erik holds a Bachelor of Science in Civil Engineering from the University at Buffalo.
Jill Ferrari
Chief Executive Officer, Michigan Community Resources
Jill Ferrari has over 19 years of experience in catalyzing urban redevelopment. Her background includes community development, private real estate acquisition and development, legal practice and consulting. As the Chief Executive Officer of Michigan Community Resources, her current mission is to provide legal, technical and educational resources to community based organizations working in low-income areas throughout Michigan. Formerly the Director of Community Development for Wayne County, she directed over $50 million dollars in state and federal funds dedicated toward neighborhood stabilization throughout Wayne County that has leveraged over $200 Million in private investment. As an attorney and private real estate developer, she has managed complex Brownfield Redevelopment projects in multiple states. She is a former member of the Board of Directors of Commercial Real Estate Women (CREW) Detroit (2001 and 2013) and a returning judge for the annual CREW Real Estate Impact Awards (2011-2014). She is the former Chairman of the Board of CreateDetroit, Inc., a non-profit dedicated to promoting the creative class in Detroit. She has also held advisory council and committee positions at The Heidelberg Project and the Detroit Opera House and has participated in coordinating successful events in Detroit such as The National Summit (2009), the Creative Cities Summit (2008) and BravoBravo! (2004-2007). Jill is an active member of the International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC) and is currently a member of the Executive Committee for the Urban Land Institute – Michigan Council, where she co-chairs the Women’s Leadership Initiative.
Robert Fishman
Professor and Author, University of Michigan, Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning
Robert Fishman teaches in the urban design, architecture, and urban planning programs at the University of Michigan. He received his Ph.D. and A.M. in history from Harvard and his A.B. in history from Stanford University. He is a nationally recognized expert in the areas of urban history and urban policy and planning. He has authored several books regarded as seminal texts, on the history of cities and urbanism including Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (1987) and Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier (1977).
Ashley Flintoff
Planner, Wayne State University
Ashley is a dual graduate of the University of Detroit Mercy with a Bachelor of Science in Architecture and a Master of Community Development. She currently works for Wayne State University in Facilities Management and Planning where she is pursuing a Master of Urban Planning. An avid fan of urban environments, Ashley is one of Detroit's biggest cheerleaders. She is a member of the UDM School of Architecture Alumni Council, a founding Board Member of the Volterra-Detroit Foundation, a member of the Association for Community Design Board of Directors and manages social media for the UDM Master of Community Development Program where she also teaches Regional Development and Sustainability. Ashley, her husband Tim and their pets Hunter and Nora are renovating a 1914 Victorian home in Detroit.
Christine Franck
Director, Center for Advanced Research in Traditional Architecture
Christine Franck is a designer, educator, and author. She currently serves as the first Director of the new Center for Advanced Research in Traditional Architecture (CARTA) at the University of Colorado Denver College of Architecture and Planning. Her design work ranges from award-winning residential design to preservation, landscape and decorative projects. In addition, she teaches, lectures, and writes on the topics of architectural design, contemporary and historic Classical architecture and historic American domestic architecture. Before establishing her own practice to focus on design and architectural education, she interned with the offices of Allan Greenberg, Architect and Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co. in Washington, DC and served as the first Executive Director of the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art. All aspects of her work are ethically focused on improving the built environment and quality of life of all individuals.
Robert Freedman
Principal, Freedman Urban Solutions
Robert Freedman is an Urban Design Consultant with over twenty five years of experience working in a wide variety of urban and suburban environments in both the public and private sectors. Between 2002 and 2013, Robert was the Director of Urban Design for the City of Toronto where he took the lead on a number of major urban design initiatives including: the creation of design guidelines for mid-rise and tall buildings and city-wide street design standards - including details for the City's emerging light-rapid-transit network. Robert also played a leading role in establishing the City's Design Review Panel.
Milton Friesen
Program Director, Social Cities at Cardus
Milton Friesen is the Program Director of Social Cities at Cardus, a North American public policy think tank based in Hamilton, Ontario. He has served as a municipal councillor and is nearing completion of a Ph.D. at the School of Planning, University of Waterloo, that explores new social imaging techniques for cities. He grew up on a farm in Northern Alberta and has always loved to design, build, and modify all things mechanical and electronic. He is a big fan of the DIY culture that has always been around but is growing in new and exciting ways.
Melissa Frisbie
Research Scientist, Bureau of Environmental and Occupational Epidemiology, New York State Department of Health
Melissa Frisbie joined the New York State Department of Health's Center for Environmental Health in 2010 where she is a research scientist and the New York State Communications Coordinator for the CDC Environmental Public Health Tracking Network. She specializes in community health and behaviors.
She is currently working to make environmental health data and education to the public through New York's State's Environmental Public Health Tracker. She is also experienced in conducting in health related community outreach related to Environmental Public Health Tracking and other health related issues.
Tim Frisbie
Communications & Policy Director, Shared Use Mobility Center
Tim leads SUMC’s communications and policy efforts. He previously served as Senior Account Executive at KSA Public Relations/Public Affairs, where he worked on several transportation projects including helping to launch Getting America to Work, a national coalition advocating for increased federal transit funding. He also planned and executed strategic communications campaigns for clients such as Alexian Brothers Health System, Chicago Bar Foundation, HACIA (Hispanic American Construction Industry), Illinois Chamber of Commerce, Midwest Energy Efficiency Alliance and Mainstreet Organization of REALTORS.
Charles- Bernard Gagnon
Architect, Principal and Founder, Cargo Architecture
Charles-Bernard is a member of the Ordre des architecture du Québec and the Paris Architectural Order. He has 20 years of experience in the design and construction of projects of all kinds on two continents. As the founder of his own office in Québec City, he directs this dynamic working space with a team of talented people with complementary skills that lead to the creation of spaces and buildings for commercial and residential purposes. Charles-Bernaard’s focus is on humanist and functional with an intention of providing occupants with environmentally-friendly, quality-design and well thought out spaces to live, work and play.
Cid Galindo
President, Centurion Property Manager
Cid Galindo is a civic volunteer dedicated to the notion that thoughtful urban planning and design are prerequisite to the evolution of great cities. He is a former member of the City of Austin Planning Commission from 2004 until 2008 and serves on the board of the Congress for the New Urbanism - Central Texas Chapter. Cid is also the founder and president of Cid A. Galindo, Inc., a development firm focused on regulatory policy, place making, and civic space activation associated with walkable urban places, as well as the president of Centurion Property Management, specializing in management of property and condominium owners associations.
John Gallagher
Journalist & Author, Detroit Free Press
John Gallagher is a veteran journalist and author whose book, “Reimagining Detroit: Opportunities for Redefining an American City,” was named by The Huffington Post as one of the best social and political books of 2010. His most recent book is “Revolution Detroit: Strategies for Urban Reinvention.” John is a native of New York City. He joined the Detroit Free Press in 1987 to cover urban and economic redevelopment efforts in Detroit and Michigan, a post which he still holds. His other books include “Great Architecture of Michigan” and, as co-author, “AIA Detroit: The American Institute of Architects Guide to Detroit Architecture.” - See more at: http://techonomy.com/people/john-gallagher/#sthash.2IekRSd3.dpuf
Mitali Ganguly
Associate, Calthorpe Associates
Mitali has been working at Calthorpe Associates since 2006. With her background in architecture, urban design and real estate, Mitali believes urban design should be an advocate for meaningful social change while negotiating market forces. Her interests include affordable housing and urban revitalization supported by transit and mixed use. She brings to Calthorpe a diverse set of skills and varied work experience in different countries.
Anthony T. Garcia
Principal, The Street Plans Collaborative
Anthony Garcia is Principal of The Street Plans Collaborative. Prior to launching the firm’s Miami office, Anthony was Project Director for six years at Chael Cooper & Associates Architects. His work there gave him a strong has a background of urban planning that includes urban design, policy writing and code analysis. He has experience in hosting public meetings, and has completed a number of bicycle and pedestrian plans at the scale of city, neighborhood, and campus and contributed to the codes and policies that help shape the resulting spaces.
Jennifer Garcia
Town Planner, Dover Kohl & Partners
Jennifer is a certified Charrette Planner through the National Charrette Institute and is an accredited professional with the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU). She received both her Master and Bachelor of Architecture from Andrews University, a leading center for the study of New Urbanism. She has spoken at national conferences including Congress for the New Urbanism about creating plan report documents and her illustrations can be seen in several publications and exhibits. While at Dover-Kohl, she has worked with both municipalities and developers alike to produce innovative master plans, form-based codes, graphics and reports that contribute to the creation of walkable, sustainable urban places.
Kenneth Garcia
Town Planner, Dover, Kohl & Partners
Kenneth has been with Dover, Kohl & Partners since 2007 and has participated in over 50 design charrettes. He produces many of the firm’s illustrations and renderings, using a combination of computer graphics and traditional watercolor techniques. Kenneth received both his Master of Architecture and his Bachelor of Architecture from Andrews University, a leading center for the study of New Urbanism. He is CNU-Accredited by the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU), and is a Certified Charrette Planner through the National Charrette Institute. Kenneth grew up in Costa Rica and Mexico, and is fluent in Spanish.
Carleton Gholz
Sound Writer, Scholar, Activist, Detroit Sound Conservancy
I am Carleton Gholz — a leader and activist in Detroit music history preservation, as well as a writer, teacher, and DJ. After completing my PhD in Communication from the University of Pittsburgh in 2011, I returned to Detroit to be the Executive Director of the Detroit Sound Conservancy. I have taught at Oakland University in Rochester Hills, Northeastern University in Boston, and at the University of Pittsburgh, as well as five years teaching in and around Detroit as a secondary social studies teacher. I will be teaching a class on the history of American music this coming winter at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit. I have published academically in sound and popular music studies. I have been a professional freelance journalist since 1999. I am currently working on my first book which chronicles the rise of DJ-culture in Detroit. I was born in Port Huron, Michigan.
Robert Gibbs
President, Gibbs Planning Group
Robert Gibbs is a nationally recognized urban retail planning consultant who has worked with some of the most respected mayors, architects and real estate developers in America. Profiled in the Atlantic Monthly, New York Times, Urban Land Institute, and the Wall Street Journal, Gibbs is said to have “an urban planning sensibility unlike anything possessed by the urban planners who usually design downtown renewal efforts.” In 2012, Gibbs was honored by the Clinton Presidential Library for his life’s contributions in urban planning and development and by the City of Auckland, New Zealand in 2011.
Garlin Gilchrist
Deputy Technology Director, Civic Community Engagement, City of Detroit
Garlin Gilchrist II's passion for advocacy, technology and policy guide his actions as a professional and a public servant. Connecting technology, new media, and grassroots organizing is the cornerstone of Mr. Gilchrist's work. Garlin is the City of Detroit's first ever Deputy Technology Director for Civic Community Engagement, where his job is to open up the city's public data and information for the consumption and benefit of all Detroiters. He most recently served as the National Campaign Director at MoveOn.org, where he focused on mobilizing MoveOn's seven million members on issues of civil rights, education, and technology policy advocacy through community organizing and online action. He also coordinated MoveOn's 2012 election mobilization program, Voters Rising. Gilchrist also the founded Detroit Diaspora, a network for native Detroiters living elsewhere to connect with one another as well as people doing positive work in the city of Detroit.
E. Stephen Goldie
City Planning Advisor, Al Ain City, Abu Dhabi Dept of Municipal Affairs
Stephen Goldie has over thirty years experience in urban planning and design across Australasia and the UAE, most of this at executive level in government. His experience ranges from regional and metropolitan strategy to complex inner-city design, from high-level policy and legislation to seemingly intractable planning applications, and from detailed urban design to complex management issues. Currently, Stephen is employed by the Abu Dhabi Department of Municipal Affairs (DMA) to facilitate the development and maintenance of Al Ain as a liveable and sustainable city by providing advice and assistance to the executive leadership of both the DMA and the city.
Anika Goss-Foster
Executive Director, Detroit Future City
Anika Goss-Foster is the Executive Director of the Detroit Future City (DFC) Implementation Office. In this role, Anika leads a dynamic team of experts to implement the DFC Strategic Framework, the guide to decision-making and investment in Detroit. She also directs all partnerships, project initiatives, investments and funding opportunities for the DFC Implementation Office. Anika joined the DFC Implementation Office after nearly 20 years of leadership in national and local roles in community development and non-profit management.
Larry Gould
Principal, Nelson\Nygaard Consulting Associates, NY
Larry is a transportation planner with over 30 years of experience in public transit planning and operations. He has created systems for implementing tens of billions in capital investment while maintaining nearly full service for customers as well as service plans for every major event and venue, and every potential and actual disaster, affecting New York City, including delay management for everyday problems. A founding member of the Congress for the New Urbanism, New York chapter, Larry advocates for reinforcing good development decisions with good transit decisions. Previously, Larry served in various capacities in the Operations Planning division of Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) New York City Transit where he was responsible for short-term service planning for bus and rail, including planning for capital projects, construction, contingencies, and special events. A member of the MTA’s Blue Ribbon Sustainability Commission, he helped developed MTA’s Smart Growth and transit-oriented development program.
Jennifer Griffin
Founding Principal, J Griffin Design, LLC
Jennifer Griffin is a practicing design professional, educator, and founding principal of J Griffin Design, LLC. She has experience working in the US, UK, and Central America on a variety of project types and scales, from small-scale renovations and additions of historic structures, to mixed-use urban infill projects, to master plans at both the neighborhood and regional scales. She has received numerous design awards for her work, including multiple Congress for the New Urbanism Charter Awards. Jennifer was educated at the University of Notre Dame, from which she received both her Bachelor of Architecture and her Master of Architectural Design and Urbanism degrees. Jennifer also has served on the faculty of the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture, where she has taught urban and architectural design courses at both the graduate and undergraduate level while conducting research on the relationship between the built environment and human flourishing.
Mark Guslits
Principal, Mark Guslits & Associates, Inc.
After practicing as an architect and affordable housing consultant in Canada and the UK, Mark now works primarily as an urban revitalization consultant and educator. Over the years he has been a partner with a large Toronto residential development company (the Daniels Group) focusing on affordable housing; Special Advisor on Housing to the City of Toronto; and Chief Development Officer for the Toronto Community Housing Corporation overseeing the initiation of the Regent Park Revitalization project. He is currently consulting to clients in Toronto, Vancouver, South Africa, and Ireland, and teaching urban design in the Institute Without Boundaries at George Brown College in Toronto and at the Munk School of Global Affairs at University of Toronto.
Arti Harchekar
Associate, Opticos Design, Inc
Arti Harchekar has focused her professional and academic efforts on creating sustainable communities through placemaking and urban design. Her municipal experience includes the successful development and implementation of corridor revitalization, neighborhood revitalization, traditional neighborhood, town center, and transit oriented plans and implementation strategies. The comprehensive plans she has worked on focus on urban design, sustainability, and market capture, and she has worked to calibrate and implement numerous Form-Based Codes. Several projects under her management have won awards from the American Planning Association Texas chapter. Before joining Opticos Design in 2015, she worked with Townscape, Inc. in Dallas, TX, managing a broad range of town planning and urban design projects.
Jason Haremza
Senior Planner/Urban Design Specialist, City of Rochester
Jason is the City of Rochester’s Senior Planner/Urban Design Specialist, working to implement the city’s award-winning zoning code. Prior to joining the city in 2007, Jason was a planner with Genesee/Finger Lakes Regional Planning Council, helping rural towns and villages with planning and zoning. Mr. Haremza has a BA in Geography from SUNY Geneseo and an MS in Planning from the University of Toronto. Together with fellow planner Tanya Zwahlen, Jason co-founded Young Lion, an enterprise dedicated to celebrating Rochester’s sense of place by producing and marketing place-based art, clothing, and other goods.
Jason Harper
Senior Medical Planner, Perkins + Will
Jason Harper, Associate Principal, has honed and applied his talent for healthcare facility design for much of his twenty-five year career. He has successfully guided many healthcare clients through complex, multi-phased planning, and construction projects. Jason is a meticulous architect. His experience and knowledge of the medical industry and its emerging trends allows him to provide clients with the information and guidance needed to solve short-range problems, as well as achieve successful long-range planning goals. His commitment to fostering the mission of his healthcare clients helps guide his efforts in delivering projects that are at once functional, beautiful, and sustainable. His current focus is on the design response to the profound changes being brought about by health care reform and an increased focus on the impact of design decision’s on public health.
Michael Hathorne
Senior Planning Manager, Suburban Land Reserve
Michael Hathorne is a land planning executive and urbanist with experience in areas such as community design, property acquisition, land entitlements, long range land planning, and land use policy. Specialties include excellent project management, negotiation, teaching and public relations skills. Other areas of expertise include New Urbanism, Transit-Oriented Development, and Form-Based Code.
Rick Hauser
Owner, In. Site: Architecture
Rick Hauser, AIA, LEED AP, identifies as a "Frontier Architect" and his Finger Lakes firm, In. Site: Architecture, embraces pioneering paradigms which have helped him navigate the uncharted territory of building a progressive practice outside the centers of fashion. From design-build and modest rural additions, through state-wide downtown revitalization work, to a nature center in the rainforests of Madagascar, I.S:A's work illustrates lessons learned on the path to building a sustainable practice, "out there."
Ari Heckman
CEO, ASH NYC
Ari Heckman is a co-founder and CEO of ASH NYC, a New York-based real estate investment and design firm. ASH NYC acquires, designs, develops and manages real estate across the United States, focused on historic assets in revitalizing urban centers. Ari graduated with honors from the College of Architecture, Art and Planning at Cornell University.
Susan Henderson, AIA, LEED AP, CNU-A
Principal, PlaceMakers LLC
As PlaceMakers' Director of Coding and Design, Susan has led numerous Form-Based Code projects including the inaugural Driehaus Form Based Code Award winner, Leander, Texas – plus numerous adoptions across North America. Susan is a LEED Accredited Professional, and brings an expertise in sustainability to form-based code writing. She is a contributor to the SmartCode & Manual as well as author of the SmartCode Landscape Module. Susan serves as a board member on the Transect Codes Council and is a member of the Form-Based Codes Institute’s Resource Council.
Daniel Hintz
Founder and Chief Experience Architect,
For the past fifteen years, Daniel Hintz has focused on merging new urbanist planning concepts, human centered economic development strategies and intentional experience design to transform community relationships with their downtown districts. He served for seven years as executive director of the non-profit Downtown Bentonville, Inc., in Bentonville, Arkansas to help implement the 1,765 acre downtown master plan. Prior to Bentonville, he served as executive director the for non-profit downtown association Fayetteville Downtown Partners, in Fayetteville, Arkansas. He founded Velocity Group in 2014 and is now working with a variety of public and private sector clients – as well as on his own development projects - to align the art and economics of extraordinary places.
Victoria Ho
Urban Planner, Milieu
Victoria Ho specializes in urban planning and public involvement. She is committed to cultivating healthier communities and loves to connect brilliant ideas to action. Victoria is interested in how to leverage expertise from both governed and chaotic spaces, and her masters research used participatory documentary video as a tool to facilitate socially just land use. Victoria has worked in farming, policy analysis, and community engagement.
Chris Holt
City Councillor, City of Windsor, Ontario
Chris Holt is a city councillor in Windsor, Ontario, Canada. His ward encompasses some of the most vibrant urban neighbourhoods in the city of 200,000 inhabitants. His ward includes the historic garden city town of Walkerville and the traditional "main streets" of Via Italia; Windsor's "little Italy" and the Ottawa Street Community. He was elected to the seat on his record of neighbourhood activism and municipal involvement. Holt was the founder of the ScaleDown franchise, a multi-media blog which evolved into an award winning radio show focused on raising the issues of quality urban design and how advocating for such improves residents quality of life. Holt was also co-founder and past president of the Olde Walkerville Residents Association, a businessman who helped introduce Windsorites to urban cycling culture through his bike shop the City Cyclery, and a fourth generation autoworker with the Ford Motor Company of Canada.
Lauren Hood
Director, Live6 Alliance-Detroit
Lauren Hood is the acting director for Live6 Alliance-Detroit. As a community development engagement expert, Hood oversees the Alliance’s work in five program areas: placemaking, business attraction and retention, residential stabilization, safety, and commercial corridor real estate development, with a particular focus on Detroit’s McNichols and Livernois corridors. Prior to joining Live6, Hood worked in various community revitalization roles. Most recently, she served as economic development project portfolio manager for the city of Highland Park. In this role she oversaw the allocation of community development block grant funds, managed housing rehab programs, demolition efforts and business attraction activities. She also served as director of community engagement for Loveland Technologies. In addition, Hood runs her own consultancy, Deep Dive Detroit, where she facilitates dialogues and designs curriculum focused on racial, social and economic justice. She was appointed to Detroit’s Historic District Commission, and is a member of Preservation Detroit’s Board of Directors.
Thom Hunt
Executive Director, City of Windsor, Planning and Building Services Department
Thom is a graduate of St. Clair College and the University of Windsor, and holds a Diploma in Civil Engineering, an Honours Bachelor of Arts Degree in Urban Planning, and a Masters Degree in Anthropology. Thom has held various roles in both private and public practice including work with consulting engineers, conservation authorities, and community sustainability initiatives; he joined the City’s Planning and Building Department in the late 1990s and is currently the Department’s Executive Director and City Planner responsible for planning and development approvals, community improvement, economic development incentives, urban design, and long range policy formulation.
Jennifer Hurley, AICP, NJPP, CNU-A
President & CEO, Hurley-Franks & Associates
Jennifer specializes in group facilitation and mediation with respect to the built environment. Jennifer wrote one of the first articles chronicling the implementation of New Urbanist zoning codes, has worked on the development of several form-based codes, and is a regular speaker with the SmartCode Workshop. Jennifer was the lead writer for the Affordable Housing Policy Guide SmartCode module and is working on a module for SmartCode Administration. She is certified as a charrette planner by the National Charrette Institute and is a past Fellow of the Knight Program in Community Building at the University of Miami School of Architecture. In recent years, Jennifer has worked to introduce new urbanists to techniques from the field of large group collaboration, including Open Space Technology, Asset Mapping, and World Café Dialogue.
Michael E. Huston, Arch., LEED AP
Architect / Urban Designer, DPZ Partners
Michael Huston is an architect and urban designer with Duany Plater-Zyberk in Miami. A licensed architect since 1993, he began his career as a principal designer for a firm specializing in educational facilities but transitioned to urban design over the years. He has worked in the public sector for the city of Louisville (an early adopter of form-based codes) and in the private sector as an independent architect and urban designer. More recently, he has consulted on numerous Transit Oriented Developments, Regulating Plans and Downtown Redevelopment Plans. From his final semester of college in Venice, Italy, to a four year “detour” in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico, he has sought to not only design traditional urban environments but also to immerse himself in them.
Xavier Iglesias
, DPZ Partners
Luisa Ji
Co-Founder, Designer, Milieu
Luisa is a graduate of the Master of Architecture at Carleton University. Her interests involve the unseen spaces and the unwanted spaces. After a term of exchange in Helsinki, Finland, she worked for Urbanus in China as an architectural designer and researcher on the Tulou Preservation Project dedicated to saving undervalued vernacular architecture. Her graduate thesis "Does Architecture Dream of Upheaval?" explores an architectural scenario where the collective intelligence of the public rejuvenates the previously derelict urban site in a restlessly playful manner.
Gracen Johnson
Founder, Ministry of Makeshift
Gracen Johnson calls her work, “Projects for Places we Love.” Her goal is to encourage the thousands of small investments that add up to remarkable places. To do so, she helps organizations with strategy, community engagement, and implementation of projects that strengthen cities. Day to day, this amounts to orchestrating legacy projects that people love, multimedia campaigns that invite neighbors to be city-builders, coaching and ground support that gets projects started fast and frugally, and knowledge translation that educates public audiences on complex issues. With a knack for designing compelling stories and visuals, Gracen also loves the art of media relations and frequently lands her clients and projects in print, digital, radio, and television news. Gracen completed her MPhil in Planning, Growth, and Regeneration from the University of Cambridge with distinction in 2013. Her portfolio is best viewed online at gracenjohnson.com
Michael Johnson
Principal Urban Designer, SmithGroupJJR
Michael Johnson is a leading multidisciplinary specialist in urban design, campus planning and landscape architecture. A co-leader of SmithGroupJJR’s Urban Design Practice, his background includes major projects for the city of Detroit and Ford Motor Company. Michael’s formal training as a landscape architect and urban designer allow him to fill a unique niche in the industry, as a practitioner, Board member for the Landscape Architecture Foundation, and guest lecturer in Urban Design at the University of Michigan, Lawrence Technological University and Ball State University.
Quincy Jones
Executive Director, Osborn Neighborhood Alliance
Quincy Jones is the Executive Director for the Osborn Neighborhood Alliance. Osborn Neighborhood Alliance is an advocacy and planning organization. It's goal is to ensure children are safe, healthy education and prepared for adulthood. Now, Quincy is campaigning for the 4th District Michigan State House of Representative, which allows him to make positive macro changes in Osborn. He is a graduated from Lawrence Tech University with a Masters in Business Administrative and a graduated Certificate in Nonprofit Management.
Peter Katz
Consultant and Author, The New Urbanism: Toward an Architecture of Community
Peter Katz played a catalytic role in launching the New Urbanism. He wrote the seminal book, The New Urbanism: Toward an Architecture of Community, and was the first executive director of the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU). During Peter’s tenure CNU obtained its first grant funding, adopted its charter, began a strategic partnership with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and convened its first international congress. Peter was recently named a fellow of CNU in recognition of his contributions to the movement. He was also the founding president of the Form-Based Codes Institute and is currently an emeritus board member of that organization. As strategic consultant to government, public agencies, and private-sector clients, Peter addresses real-world needs with state-of-the-art planning practices. In this role, he has played a key role in shaping and implementing a range of nationally significant community design and development projects. Peter studied architecture and graphic design at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City. He now serves on Cooper Union’s board of trustees.
Doug S. Kelbaugh, FAIA
Professor of Architecture and Urban Planning, Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan
Douglas S. Kelbaugh, FAIA, professor, and former Dean of the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan, received a B.A. Magna Cum Laude and M.Arch from Princeton University. From 1977 to 1985 he was principal in Kelbaugh+Lee, which won 15 design awards and competitions. He then served as Chair of the Department of Architecture at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he was principal in Kelbaugh, Calthorpe and Associates. He was editor of The Pedestrian Pocket Book in 1989 (which helped jumpstart TOD), The Michigan Debates on Urbanism in 2005, and Writing Urbanism in 2008, and is the author of Common Place: Toward Neighborhood and Regional Design, and Repairing the American Metropolis: Beyond Common Place. Doug is the winner of the 2016 Topaz Medallion for Excellence in Architectural Education, the highest award in the field given by the AIA and ACSA (Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture). He recently served as Executive Director of Design and Planning for a Dubai development company with an international portfolio of mixed use, walkable and TOD projects.
James Khamsi
Principal, FIRM Architecture and Design
James Khamsi (RA, AIA) is principal of FIRM Architecture and Design, an emerging New York City-based practice he founded in 2010. The firm specializes in public and cultural spaces within the city, and is known for its innovative use of structure, patterns and materials. James has experience delivering projects in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom which range in scale from urban masterplans and public infrastructure to private interiors and furniture pieces. James received his Bachelor of Architecture from Cornell University, and his Masters of Architecture with distinction from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. His work has been published in Metropolis, Actar’s Verb series, Volume, MONU, Scapegoat and Interior Design magazine. He is the editor of “Huburbs: Transit and Urbanism in the Greater Toronto Hamilton Area,” published 2012 by the University of Toronto. Beyond his practice, James is active in research and teaching. He is currently Adjunct Associate Professor at Columbia University, and he has held positions at Cornell University, the University of Toronto, and Harvard.
Marina Khoury
Partner, DPZ Partners
Marina Khoury is an expert in sustainable urbanism, TND's and form-based codes and speaks on issues related to creating affordable, sustainable, walkable communities. A licensed architect, she is a Partner at Duany Plater-Zyberk and Company (DPZ) and the Director of Town Planning who leads the metro Washington D.C. office. Khoury manages new towns, new codes and urban redevelopment plans in the United States, Canada, Middle East and Europe. She was the DPZ project director for Miami 21, the comprehensive rewriting of the City of Miami's zoning code into the largest-known application of a form-based code.
David Kim
Co-founder & Principal , Anderson|Kim Architecture+Urban Design
David Kim is a co-founder and principal of Anderson|Kim Architecture+Urban Design. He is a registered architect in California and New York and believes that good buildings and places result from understanding the constraints and opportunities beyond the boundaries of the individual project. He oversees the delivery and implementation of architectural design and documentation as well as the daily management and operations of the office.
Grace Kim
Founding Principal, Schemata Workshop
Grace Kim is a founding principal of Schemata Workshop and has been practicing architecture in Chicago and Seattle for more than 20 years. Grace is a consensus builder, helping her clients and project stakeholders envision how a completed project will be experienced. She is a compassionate listener and sensitive designer, paying attention to both the present and future needs of her clients. Grace is the author of The Survival Guide to Architectural Internship and Career Development, and in 2008, she was recipient of the National AIA Young Architect Award. For four years, Grace served on the board of the Cohousing Association of the US. She is also a founding member of Capitol Hill Urban Cohousing. Grace is currently a commissioner of the Seattle Planning Commission and serves on the board for the Capitol Hill Chamber of Commerce. Grace is frequently asked to present at national conferences on the topics of mentorship, Cohousing, and alternative housing models for seniors and those with disabilities.
Katherine Kittrell
Principal, mirco.villas
Katherine Kittrell is founder of micro.villas, a developer of high density, urban infill intentional communities. Summer 2016, twelve game-changing 435 square foot modular units will be available for rent near downtown Salt Lake City light rail. At over 160 dwellings/acre, the five-story design provides sweeping mountain views, amenity-rich shared patios, and private balconies. Furnished units are carefully designed to exceed the functionality typically found in a one-bedroom apartment. Katherine’s professional career includes over 20 years of financial systems analysis and asset management experience. Her educational background includes extensive coursework in the University of Utah’s City and Metropolitan Planning PhD program and Arizona State University’s Sustainability PhD program. She holds a BA in Finance and a Master’s of Urban and Environmental Planning from ASU. Katherine’s two millennial-aged college children continue to inspire her unique approach to lifelong learning.
Elizabeth Knibbe
Principal, Quinn Evans Architects
Lis has over 30 years experience in architecture and historic preservation and has served as architect on a wide range of adaptive use projects to facilitate the rehabilitation and expansion of historic buildings to meet contemporary needs. She has special expertise and experience in historic tax credit programs and has assisted clients in designing projects that meet state and federal historic preservation standards. Lis leads our Detroit studio.
Paul L. Knight, AICP, CNU-A
Urban Designer & Architect, Historical Concepts
Paul L. Knight, AICP, is an architectural and urban designer at Historical Concepts, an architecture and planning firm in Atlanta, Georgia. He is also the president of the Douglas C. Allen Institute for the Study of Cities, a nonprofit devoted to advancing the collective knowledge of how cities grow and evolve over time. Mr. Knight is a graduate of the Georgia Institute of Technology with dual Masters degrees in Architecture and City & Regional Planning. As a professional member of the American Institute of Certified Planners, Mr. Knight engages in research on the link between legal codes and the built environment. His work has been presented at multiple Congresses for the New Urbanism, National Planning Conferences, the University of Georgia, and to the Atlanta Regional Commission.
Joseph Kohl
Co-founder, Dover, Kohl & Partners
Joe Kohl is a founding partner of Dover, Kohl & Partners. He is recognized nationally as an innovator in urban design and graphic communication. He pioneered the firm's use of computer imaging simulations and authored many of its illustrated land development regulations. He holds degrees from the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and the University of Miami.
Eric Kronberg
Principal, Kronberg Wall Architects
Jennifer Krouse, LEED AP
Founder, Steepletown Studios and Imagining North Adams
Jennifer Krouse is a strategist and entrepreneur. She is the founder of Steepletown Studios, a web development studio, and Imagining North Adams, a 2012 placemaking festival that continues to effect change in its host city. From 2008-2012, she served on the Steering Committee of NextGen: The Next Generation of New Urbanists. As two-time Co-Chair and co-organizer of the Open Source Congress – the grassroots component of the Congress for the New Urbanism – she has facilitated idea marketplaces for groups as small as 30 and as large as 250. Jen holds a BA from Williams College and an MBA from the Stockholm School of Economics, and she is a regular guest contributor to the Strong Towns blog.
James H. Kunstler
Author, The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition
James Howard Kunstler has written several non-fiction books focusing in on urbanism, including The Geography of Nowhere, The City in Mind, and The Long Emergency. Mr. Kunstler has also written several fictional novels including World Made By Hand, A History of the Future, and the forthcoming The Harrows of Spring. He has been a regular contributor to the New York Times Sunday Magazine and Op-Ed page, where he has written on environmental and economic issues. He graduated from the State University of New York, Brockport campus, worked as a reporter and feature writer for a number of newspapers, and finally as a staff writer for Rolling Stone Magazine. He has lectured at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, Dartmouth, Cornell, MIT, RPI, the University of Virginia and many other colleges, and he has appeared before many professional organizations such as the AIA, the APA, and the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
Matthew Lambert
Partner, DPZ Partners
Matthew, a planner and architectural designer, is a partner, senior project manager, and director of technology with Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co. With more than ten years of practice, he has broad experience in planning and urban design as well as architectural design at all scales from regional planning and coding to infill and affordable housing. Matt is a graduate of the University of Miami with a dual major in Architecture and Computer Science.
Michael Lander
President and Founder, Lander Group
Michael Lander, 57, is founder and president of the Lander Group, a Minneapolis-based real estate development firm specializing in urban infill projects. He has been active in the planning, design, and development of commercial, residential, and mixed-use real estate projects in California, North Dakota, Minnesota and Iowa. Since relocating to Minneapolis in 1990, the Lander Group, alone and in partnerships with other firms, has developed and sold many successful infill residential projects and completed substantial renovations of mixed-use commercial buildings. Lander is a member of the Urban Land Institute, the Congress of the New Urbanism, T4America/LOCUS, and the Minnesota chapter of the AIA. He serves on the public policy committee of the Builders' Association of the Twin Cities and the Board of Directors of Transit for Livable Communities. He is a licensed real estate broker and general contractor in Minnesota, and holds the CCIM designation from the National Association of Realtors. He is a past president of the Minnesota/South Dakota CCIM chapter.
Eric Larson
CEO, Downtown Detroit Partnership
In mid-2014, Mr. Larson took over the role of CEO of The Downtown Detroit Partnership (DDP); an organization whose board he has been a member of since 1995. DDP is involved with a large number of enterprises within Downtown Detroit including The Downtown Detroit BIZ, a special assessment district that provides cleaning, safety and landscaping services, The Detroit 300 Conservancy, which has raised more than $20 million to create, design and construct Campus Martius Park, and D:hive, a physical storefront in Detroit’s Central Business District that connects people to resources that help them live, work and engage in the city. With over 30 years of experience in real estate, in 1999 Eric founded Larson Realty Group; a Michigan based company engaged in real estate investment, development, asset management and leasing. During Mr. Larson’s career he has developed, financed, owned and managed over $3 billion of real estate including; General Motor’s purchase and redevelopment of the Renaissance Center, Millender Center, One Detroit Center, and The A. Alfred Taubman Center for Design Education in downtown Detroit.
Jason Laub
Vice President, Nautilus Group, NEMO Building Systems
Jason Laub is Vice President & Director of Operations for Nautilus Group, a fully integrated real estate development firm which performs all aspects of real estate development in house, from land acquisition to sales and leasing activities, including design, engineering and general contracting. Jason and his team are currently focused on their factory-built housing manufactured by their sister company, Nemo Building Systems, at their own factory in Lathrop, California. The factory-built housing arrives on site 95% complete, including all finishes, appliances and building skin. Jason was honored by Engineering News Record as ENR California’s Top 20 Under 40 in 2016. He is a Planning Commissioner for the City of Concord, CA and a graduate of California Polytechnic University, San Luis Obispo, with a B.S. in Construction Management and a Business Minor.
Bill Lennertz
Executive Director, National Charrette Institute
Bill Lennertz, AIA, is Executive Director of the National Charrette Institute. First as Director of the Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company (DPZ) Boston office, then as a partner with Lennertz Coyle & Associates, Bill has managed over 150 charrettes. Bill co-developed and teaches the NCI Charrette System™, the first structured approach to design-based collaborative community planning. Since he co-founded NCI in 2001, Bill has trained top staff from various organizations including the US DOD, World Bank, US EPA, US General Services Administration, Parsons Brinckerhoff as well as public planning agencies and private firms nationally. Bill is co-author of The Charrette Handbook published by the American Planning Association. He received his Masters of Architecture in Urban Design from Harvard University where he annually teaches the NCI Charrette System™ certificate course. Bill is currently the President of the CNU-Cascadia chapter.
Lydia Rae Levinson
Planning & Technical Program Manager, Michigan Community Resources
Lydia Rae Levinson draws upon her experiences in real estate, geographic information systems (GIS), community development, and sustainable agriculture. Lydia worked in real estate and property preservation in Detroit before being awarded a research fellowship at Iowa State University (ISU) where she earned a Master of Community and Regional Planning and a Master of Science in Sustainable Agriculture. Lydia’s graduate thesis focused on citizen-driven efforts to create sustainable farm and food systems through local land use regulations. A desire to promote equitable, sustainable (urban) farm and food systems led her back to the Motor City. Lydia’s work as Planning and Technical Program Manager at Michigan Community Resources (MCR) primarily concentrates on returning vacant spaces to productive uses that provide environmental, social, and economic benefits for community groups. She’s passionate about civic agriculture, food sovereignty, and environmental justice.
Matthew Lewis
Assistant Director of Planning & Development Review- Urban Design Long Range Planning, City of Austin
Matthew Lewis, CNUa, is an urbanist, geographer, and city planner that discovered the real truth to community based investment and economic prosperity. He currently holds the position as Assistant Director of Planning & Zoning for the City of Austin and is on the National CNU Board. His ability to achieve community happiness and political balance has helped reshape the way cities look at development and community processes. Matthew was previously the Development Services Director for two of the fastest growing cities in the nation, Hutto and San Marcos, Texas. He earned a degree in Geography: Urban & Regional Planning from Texas State University in 2003. Matthew travels across the world assisting communities in creating places people love. Matthew’s approach to redefining our communities has received local, state and national awards and recognition.
Sarah A. Lewis, R.A., CNU-A, LEED AP
Architect & Urban Designer, GreaterPlaces
Sarah Lewis was born in Great Britain and moved to the U.S. during high school. She received a Bachelor of Architecture degree from the University of Tennessee, moved to Washington DC in 1988 to practice architecture, and then realized her true passion was urban design. She was President of the Washington DC Chapter of the CNU since its inception in 2002 through 2012 and is also a National Board Member. She has taught architectural design studios at the University of Maryland and frequently teaches Management and Facilitation for the National Charrette Institute.
Ian Lockwood
Livable Transportation Engineer, Toole Design Group
Ian Lockwood, P.E. is a recognized national leader in sustainable transportation policy and urban design. As a former partner in the Orlando-based Glatting Jackson (which later became AECOM), Ian led a wide variety of transportation projects aimed at making communities more walkable, bikable and transit-friendly. He also served as the City Transportation Planner for the City of West Palm Beach, where he transformed state arterial roads, local roads, and the City’s approach to parking to help the city overcome its blighted condition and evolve into an economically and socially successful city. Ian’s current work includes walkability projects, restoring one-way streets to two-way, taming arterials, shared spaces, policy reform, and designing main streets, campuses, and downtowns. Ian has guest lectured at several universities and is occasionally interviewed on National Public Radio. In 2011, Ian was awarded a Loeb Fellowship at Harvard University during which he studied the links between transportation, land use, and successful outcomes for communities at all scales. For fun, Ian enjoys photography, cartooning, and road cycling.
Wayne London
Senior Architect / Principal, Populous
Wayne London is a project manager at Populous with more than 40 years of architectural experience in the greater Kansas City community. Prior to joining Populous, Wayne’s experience included a diverse background in housing, commercial developments and collegiate projects. During his 19 years with that firm, he played an active role in projects at William Jewell College, Rockhurst University and Longview Community College. At Populous, Wayne has served as project manager on many professional and collegiate sports facilities.
Mike Lydon
Principal, The Street Plans Collaborative
Mike Lydon is the founding Principal of The Street Plans Collaborative. Before launching the firm in 2009, Lydon worked for Smart Growth Vermont, the Massachusetts Bicycle Coalition, and Ann Arbor's GetDowntown Program. From 2006 - 2009 Lydon worked for Duany Plater-Zyberk and Company (DPZ). As a planner, writer, and advocate, Mike's work has appeared in or been featured by CNN Headline News, Planetizen, Grist, Utne Reader, Next American City Magazine, New Urban News, Planning Magazine, Streetsblog, the Miami Herald, the El Paso Times, and The Village Voice, among other publications.
Michael Mabaquiao
Designer, Torti Gallas & Partners
Michael Mabaquiao has been a designer at Torti Gallas and Partners for two years, working on mixed-use urban infill projects in the Washington/Baltimore area, as well as international projects in Turkey, the Caribbean, and Canada. He received his Bachelor's and Master's Degree in Architecture from the New Urbanist program at Andrews University, and went on to study advanced urban design techniques under Douglas Duany at the University of Notre Dame, earning a Master's Degree in Classical Architecture and Urban Design. Michael also worked for several years at Duany-Plater Zyberk & Partners in Miami, contributing to a number of community design initiatives and regional planning projects in the United States, the Middle East and Asia.
Mary E. Madden
Principal, Ferrell Madden Lewis, LLC
Mary Madden, AICP has nearly 20 years of experience in the fields of urban planning and design, community development, and historic preservation at the federal, state, and local levels. Current work includes town planning and urban design for public and private sector clients, with an emphasis on revising zoning codes to promote smart growth, sustainability and New Urbanism. Recent projects have been in Prince George’s County, Maryland (suburban Washington, DC); Memphis, Tennessee; Leesburg, Virginia; and Peoria, Illinois. She recently co-authored “Placemaking with Form-Based Codes” for the September 2006 issue of Urban Land magazine and was a contributor to the APA/CNU publication Codifying New Urbanism: How to Reform Municipal Land Development Regulations. She has been an adjunct faculty member for the Virginia Tech Department of Urban Affairs and Planning and frequently speaks on the topics of planning, design, and form-based codes. Before joining Ferrell Madden Lewis in 2002, Ms. Madden served in several positions at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, including as the Assistant Deputy Secretary for Field Policy and Management, where she managed the Community Builder program, and as a Special Assistant to the HUD Secretary. Earlier in her career, she was the Assistant Coordinator of the Mayors’ Institute on City Design, and worked in the Arkansas Historic Preservation Program. Ms. Madden holds a Master of Urban and Environmental Planning degree from the University of Virginia and a Bachelor of Arts in Architecture from Princeton University. Ms. Madden is a member of the American Institute of Certified Planners, the Congress for the New Urbanism and the American Planning Association. She is a Charter Board Member of the Form-Based Codes Institute.
Jordana Maisel
Director of Outreach and Policy Studies, University of Buffalo, Center for Inclusive Design and Environmental Access
Jordana Maisel, M.U.P, PhD Candidate, is the Director of Outreach and Policy Studies at the Center for Inclusive Design and Environmental Access (IDeA), located at the University at Buffalo. She also serves as a Co-Director of the Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center (RERC) on Universal Design in the Built Environment at Buffalo and a Program Lead for the Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center on Accessible Public Transportation (RERC-APT). Ms. Maisel is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the School of Architecture and Urban and Regional Planning at UB.
Her current research includes projects on the effectiveness of universal design, policy and planning issues related to inclusive housing design strategies and streetscape design, and evidence based guidelines for universal design. She is the co-author of Universal Design: Creating Inclusive Environments (Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2012). I
Alan Mallach
Senior Fellow, Center for Community Progress
Writer, scholar, practitioner and advocate, Alan Mallach has been engaged with the challenges of urban revitalization, neighborhood stabilization and housing provision for fifty years. A senior fellow with the Center for Community Progress, he has held a number of public and private sector positions, and currently also teaches in the graduate city planning program at Pratt Institute in New York City. His publications include many books, among them Bringing Buildings Back: From Vacant Properties to Community Assets and A Decent Home: Planning, Building and Preserving Affordable Housing, as well as numerous articles, book chapters and reports. He has a B.A. degree from Yale College, and lives in Roosevelt, New Jersey.
Charles Marohn, P.E., AICP
President, Strong Towns
Charles Marohn - known as "Chuck" to friends and colleagues - is a Professional Engineer (PE) licensed in the State of Minnesota and a member of the American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP). He has a Bachelor's degree in Civil Engineering from the University of Minnesota's Institute of Technology and a Masters in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute. He is the author of Thoughts on Building Strong Towns (Volume 1), the primary author of the Strong Towns Blog and the host of the Strong Towns Podcast and See it Differently TV. Chuck grew up on a small farm in Central Minnesota. The oldest of three sons of two elementary school teachers, he graduated from Brainerd High School in 1991. Chuck joined the Minnesota National Guard on his 17th birthday during his junior year of high school and served for nine years. Besides being passionate about planning and small towns, he loves playing music, is an obsessive reader and is a season ticket holder of the Minnesota Twins. Chuck and his wife live with their two daughters and two Samoyeds just north of Baxter, Minnesota.
John Massengale
Principal, Massengale & Co LLC
John Massengale has won awards for architecture, urbanism, historic preservation and architectural history. An architect and urbanist in New York City, he is the Chair of CNU New York and co-author with Robert A.M. Stern and Gregory Gilmartin of New York 1900, the first architecture book nominated for a National Book Award.
Steve J. Maun
Principal, Leyland Alliance
Steve J. Maun is the President of LeylandAlliance LLC, a Tuxedo, New York-based company that is taking a leading role in creating traditional neighborhoods across the Northeast, mid-Atlantic and Southeast. Steve has been a student of New Urbanism since its inception, and has fostered the vision now pursued by LeylandAlliance – to build a new company exclusively focused on the creation of new towns and neighborhoods – places that embrace tradition while setting new standards for innovation and environmental responsibility. To carry out its vision, LeylandAlliance forms strong working partnerships with talented and dedicated professionals who share its values and support its vision. Mr. Maun is a graduate of Princeton University and an executive board member of the Seaside Institute and the National Town Builders Association, a leading organization advocating smart growth and traditional neighborhood design.
Ute Maya-Giambattista
Principal, SGL Planning
Ute is an Urban Designer with more than 15 years of experience and currently heads the Urban Design Department at SGL Planning & Design.
As an urban designer, Ute approaches her work with the understanding that design can be a vehicle for creating healthy places and communities being aware of the complexities of urban spaces and the potential of infrastructure to transform the vitality of a place. Integral to all her management and design work is her commitment to the integration of social, economic, and environmental sustainable practices from the early stages of the process
Sonya S. Mays
President and CEO, Develop Detroit
Sonya S. Mays is the President and CEO of Develop Detroit – a real estate and housing development firm focused on improving housing stability and creating economic opportunities across Detroit. She previously served as Senior Advisor to the Emergency Manager of Detroit. Prior to working on Detroit’s historic bankruptcy, Ms. Mays was a Vice President in Deutsche Bank’s Corporate & Investment Bank Division in New York City. Before becoming an investment banker, Ms. Mays spent several years as a non-profit management professional. She began her professional career as a middle- school mathematics teacher in Detroit. Ms. Mays holds a Bachelor of Science, a Juris Doctor and a Masters in Business Administration, all from the University of Michigan. She is admitted to practice law in New York.
Neil McEachern
Retired Teacher and Principal, Detroit Public Schools
Neil McEachern retired from the Detroit Public Schools after a long career as a teacher and principal. While not an architect, he is both an architecture and local history enthusiast. He has lived in Lafayette Park for 25 years and is very familiar with the area.
Marcy McInelly, AIA
President, Urbsworks, Inc
Marcy McInelly has practiced architecture and urban design for more than 27 years in New York City and Portland, Oregon. In 1995, she founded Urbsworks, and redirected her expertise to the often-neglected space between buildings. Over time she has sharpened her focus on a multi-disciplinary, collaborative approach to sustainable urban design and placemaking, with a particular emphasis on smart, safe transportation and innovative codes for the benefit of communities. In 2004, Marcy was appointed to co-chair the CNU Transportation Task Force, which she renamed the Project for Transportation Reform. This is the group that just published the “CNU Sustainable Street Network Principles,” and initiated the joint CNU and ITE (Institute of Transportation Engineers) Recommended Practice, “Designing Walkable Urban Thoroughfares: A Context Sensitive Approach.”
Matthew McNicholas, AIA
Principal, MGLM Architects
Matthew McNicholas is an architect, urbanist, and founding principal of MGLM Architects. For the last 10 years, he has regularly conceived and executed ornamental and decorative programs and designs for all types of buildings, and has served extensively as a thematic, decorative, and ornamental consultant. A published and awarded artist and designer, he currently heads the Preservation Committee of the Auxiliary Board for Louis Sullivan's Auditorium Theatre and sits on the Education Committee for the Chicago-Midwest Chapter of the ICAA. Matthew graduated from the University of Notre Dame where he received his Bachelor’s of Architecture and Master’s of Architectural Design and Urbanism.
Brendan Mehaffy
Executive Director, Office of Strategic Planning, City of Buffalo
Brendan Mehaffy was appointed Executive Director of the Office of Strategic Planning in March 2010. Mehaffy’s appointment was a central part of the city’s economic development reorganization effort, which Mayor Brown announced during his 2009 State of the City Address. Mehaffy began working as an attorney in the city’s Law Department, where he was the point person on several high profile projects, including negotiating with the county on the return of the operation and management of city parks. Prior to working for the city, he worked in private practice and was focused on land use, environmental and small business development issues. This included working with municipalities across the country to revise and update their zoning codes. He holds a B.A. in economics from SUNY Binghamton, a Masters degree in urban regional planning from the London School of Economics and a J.D. in law from the University at Buffalo.
Michael Mehaffy
Executive Director, Sustasis Foundation
Michael Mehaffy is a consultant, researcher, author and educator, a contributing author to sixteen books, on the editorial boards of three international urban design journals, and a regular contributor to Better Cities and Towns, The Atlantic Cities, Metropolis, Urban Land, Planetizen and others. He is also executive director of the Sustasis Foundation in Portland, where he collaborates with wiki inventor Ward Cunningham, pattern language inventor Christopher Alexander, and other innovators in planning, architecture, software and other fields, developing new neighborhood-scale tools and approaches.
Tom Milano
Director, Jefferson Chalmers Community Food System
As the director of the Jefferson Chalmers Community Food System JCCFS), a Michigan non-profit organization, Tom Milano, his partner Nancy Weigandt and several board members, oversee two projects: The Garden Detroit where they have transformed 23 vacant lots into a beautiful and productive organic urban farm and Detroit Abloom, a new cut-flower business being established on nine vacant lots purchased from the Detroit Land Bank Authority. While the JCCFS is pioneering innovative ways to repurpose vacant land for the betterment of local communities, Tom loves to plant a vision in peoples minds of why Detroit is poised to inspire the world.
Mark Miller
Senior Urban Designer, Nederveld
Mark Miller is an urban designer for Nederveld in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He received a Masters of Architecture at the University of Michigan and is a registered architect and a certified planner. Mr. Miller is the past-chairman of the City of Grand Rapids Historic Preservation Commission and past-president of the Grand Rapids Chapter of the AIA. Mark’s award-winning projects include recently completed form-based codes for the Michigan cities of Wyoming, Muskegon, and Traverse City; a parking strategy for downtown Muskegon; the Imagine Hudsonville 2030 Master Plan; GR Forward, a master plan for downtown Grand Rapids; and the East Hills Public Space Strategy, a people-centered guide to build a better neighborhood. Mr. Miller also serves on the City of Grand Rapids Vital Street Oversight Commission and the Downtown Grand Rapids Inc. Alliance for Investment.
Rodrick Miller
President & CEO, Detroit Economic Growth Corporation
Currently, Miller is serving as President & CEO of the Detroit Economic Growth Corporation (DEGC). As CEO of DEGC, Miller is firmly committed to enhancing strategies and programs that are aggressive and effective, thoughtful and focused, and that play to the inherent strengths of the local market. Previously, Miller served as the founding president and CEO of the New Orleans Business Alliance (NOLABA), the official economic development organization responsible for ensuring the long-term economic vitality and driving job growth for the City of New Orleans. In that role, his team was responsible for nearly $900M in new private sector investment and over 7,500 new jobs. Prior to that position, Miller served as the Executive Vice President of the Baton Rouge Area Chamber where he managed day-to-day operations, developed strategic initiatives, and helped deliver on the firm’s $20M capital campaign. He has held other roles in the public, private, and nonprofit sectors.
Jessica Millman
Owner, The Agora Group, LLC
Jessica Cogan Millman is an expert and leader in urban planning, environmentally sustainable development, and the principles of smart growth. As a founding member of the LEED for Neighborhood Development (LEED ND) Core Committee, Jessica drafted (and re-drafted and re-drafted) many of the credits. Currently, Jessica is the Chair of the LEED ND Core Committee and a member of the Location and Planning TAG. Jessica was also a member of the Near Westside Initiative LEED ND Pilot Project in Syracuse, NY. In addition, Jessica is LEED faculty and helped design the LEED ND Core Concepts Workshop.Jessica has extensive experience working at all levels of government (Federal, State, andLocal) and also in the non-profit arena. Jessica now leads a private consulting practice, the Agora Group, which draws on her active and diverse career promoting and advancing the best practices to achieve high quality, sustainable communities. In addition, Jessica serves on the Planning Board for the Town of Skaneateles, NY.Prior to founding the Agora Group, Jessica served as the Planning Director for the Coalition for Smarter Growth. At the Coalition, Jessica primarily advocated for the adoption of good planning policies around the Washington region. Jessica has held many other positions including: the Deputy Director of the Smart Growth Leadership Institute, which was created by former Maryland Governor Parris Glendening to help state and local elected, civic and business leaders design and implement effective smart growth strategies; Chief of Staff for the Governor’s Office of Smart Growth in Maryland and as the Director of Program and Policy Coordination at the Maryland Department of Planning; and a variety of positions in the Urban and Economic Development Division and the Office of Water at the United States Environmental Protection Agency.
Joe Minicozzi
Principal, Urban3, LLC
Joe Minicozzi is the principal of Urban3, a consulting company created by Asheville real estate developer, Public Interest Projects. Urban3’s work in pioneering geo-spatial representation of economic productivity has prompted a paradigm shift in understanding the economic potency of urbanism and the value of well designed cities. Their studies of cities in the United States and Canada have affected the reevaluation of public policy and a broader understanding of market dynamics created by tax policy.
Jonathan Minkoff
Founder, Chief Financial Officer, ASH NYC
Jonathan Minkoff leads financial and business operations at ASH NYC. He is responsible for directing the analytics and underwriting team, as well as liaising with lenders, investors and outside counsel. He was previously at Cayuga Capital Management. Jonathan was raised in Bethesda, Maryland and graduated from the University of Wisconsin, Madison with a degree in Economics. His family is active in the real estate and construction industries in the Washington, DC area.
D.J. Monahan
Principal, The Monahan Company
D.J. Monahan is a principal of the Detroit-area based Construction Management / General Contracting firm The Monahan Company (TMC). The firm specializes in intense, complex, projects that typically involve work in high-density urban environments - often with historic implications - with a wide variety of mixed uses including residential, hospitality, retail, commercial, institutional, health care, worship, light-industrial and the like. DJ joined TMC in 1993 after graduating with a B.S. in Construction Management from Michigan State University. Since that time, DJ has had the opportunity to be involved in various capacities on several hundred projects ranging in size from under $1 million to in excess of $40 million. DJ also served a 7-year term as Board Chairman of LifeBUILDERS (LB); a faith-based community development corporation on Detroit’s east side during which time the ministry’s budget grew from $50,000.00 to over $2 million.
Dorian Moore
Vice President, Archive DS
Dorian Moore, AIA, vice-president of the award-winning architectural firm, Archive DS, has been involved in a wide range of architecture, and urban planning projects. Dorian’s focus has been on large-scale planning issues and analyzing how they affect localized placemaking. In addition to being an urban design consultant on the Woodward Avenue BRT and Complete Streets Masterplans he was among a select group of architects and planners invited to Mississippi as part of the charrette planning team for 11 cities along the Gulf Coast that were ravaged by hurricane Katrina. He was a member of an international team of architects and urban designers invited to develop a vision for the underutilized “portlands” in Toronto, Canada. He was a member of the Core Support Staff for the Mayor’s Detroit Land Use Master Plan Task Force in Detroit, Michigan.
Sue Mosey
Executive Director, Midtown Detroit, Inc
Susan T. Mosey has been the Executive Director of Midtown Detroit, Inc. (MDI) in Detroit, Michigan for twenty nine years. This non-profit organization is responsible for community development, marketing, real estate, small business development and arts programming within Detroit’s University Cultural Center and New Center districts – an area now known as Midtown. MDI also manages public space maintenance and security initiatives for the district. Projects that have been undertaken by the organization under her direction include public improvements such as new streetscapes and park development, greenway planning and construction, and residential and commercial real estate development and management. MDI’s newest initiative is the Live Midtown Residential Incentive Program that encourages employees of the anchors to move to Midtown. The organization also produces a number of signature arts events, including Art X Detroit, DLECTRICITY and Noel Night.
Elizabeth Moule
Principal, Moule & Polyzoides Architects & Urbanists
Elizabeth Moule's career includes the design and planning of projects for educational, institutional and civic clients, historic rehabilitation, mixed-use, commercial projects, housing and urban design. She is a co-founder of the Congress for the New Urbanism and an Emeritus Board Member. With her partner, Stefanos Polyzoides, she founded Moule & Polyzoides, Architects and Urbanists in 1982. A long-time advocate for sustainable design, Ms. Moule designed the LEED Platinum-rated west coast headquarters of the Natural Resources Defense Council and is currently leading the design for a new 180-bed residence hall for Scripps College as well as a new high-speed rail station in Tampa. Ms. Moule, with her partner, is a Seaside Prize recipient.
Steve A. Mouzon, AIA, LEED
Principal, The New Urban Guild
Steve is an architect, urbanist, author, blogger, and photographer from Miami. He founded the New Urban Guild, which helped foster the Katrina Cottages movement. The Guild hosts Project:SmartDwelling, which works to redefine the house to be much smaller and more sustainable. Steve founded and is a board member of the Guild Foundation; it hosts the Original Green initiative. Steve speaks regularly across the US and abroad on sustainability issues. He blogs on the Original Green Blog and Useful Stuff. He also posts to the Original Green Twitter stream.
Michael Mullins
President, Mullins Management Company
Michael Mullins is a real estate developer, asset manager and entrepreneur based in Boston. He has interests in real estate development, entrepreneurship, environmental policy, and innovations in civic finance. He is the President of Mullins Management Company. He is also founder of RE|WORK Coworking, a coworking space for real estate firms and the Lean Startup Challenge, an accelerator for technology startups. Michael’s real estate experience also includes planning, finance, construction management, public relations, and entitlements. Michael has an undergraduate degree from the University of Miami, a Masters degree from the MIT Center for Real Estate, and an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
Robert Munson
Founding Board Member, CNU Illinois
Robert Munson, a gratefully retired real estate developer, now follows his passion by blogging on central stations. He completed an eight article series posted in 2014 on “The Urbanophile” and will launch this year the site “What Stations Teach”, a look at how central stations with legacy commuter systems are microcosms for how a region manages and plans for sustainability in its transportation.
Pashon Murray
Owner & Co-Founder, Detroit Dirt
Pashon Murray has an unrelenting drive for waste reduction, recycling, and reuse of materials. She is helping to change the carbon footprint of Detroit through revitalizing neighborhoods, finding solutions for everyday waste, and eliminating trips to the landfill. In 2010 Murray co-founded Detroit Dirt, a local composting and biomass collection company that specializes in providing compost and biomass solutions for the metro Detroit community. Detroit Dirt’s closed-loop model process was designed by Murray to help revitalize Detroit. In 2012, she launched Sustainable Integrations (SI), a Detroit-based 501(c)(3) organization that combats environmental deterioration through learning, educating, leading, and serving the public with programs and services on sustainable land utilization, ecosystem remediation, renewable energy practices, and improved waste management. In May of 2014, Newsweek named Murray as one of its “13 Women in Business to Bet On.”
Aaron Naparstek
Founder and Editor in Chief, Streetsblog
Aaron Naparstek is a pioneering interactive media producer, journalist and leader of New York City’s livable streets movement. As the founder of Streetsblog Aaron played an instrumental role in building a movement that is transforming New York and other world cities by reversing decades of car-oriented planning and policy in favor of sustainable streets that prioritize pedestrians, cyclists and transit riders. As a neighborhood activist and community organizer, Naparstek’s advocacy has led to the development of new bike lanes, public plazas, car-free parks and safer streets in his own Brooklyn neighborhood and throughout the five boroughs. Aaron got his start in transportation policy by writing haiku poetry about the endless horn-honking observed from his apartment window in Brooklyn. He taped the poems to lampposts and called them Honku. This seemingly quixotic personal anger management technique evolved into a surprisingly effective advocacy campaign that eventually compelled city officials to fix his neighborhood’s dysfunctional street. Currently living in Cambridge, Massachusetts with his wife and two young sons Naparstek just completed a Loeb Fellowship at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and is now conducting research and developing new projects as a Visiting Scholar at MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning.
David Newsome
Director of Operations, CNU’s New England Chapter
David Newsome is the Director of Operations for CNU’s New England Chapter. This summer he is helping the chapter develop a regional vision and establish the plans to realize those visions as a regional chapter of CNU. He is currently pursuing his MBA and Masters in City Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he has one more year of study left. Prior to MIT he was a consultant with McKinsey & Company in Miami where he focused on projects related to urban sustainability, transportation, and logistics.
Paul Nichols
Educational Planning Officer, Toronto District School Board
A father, urban planner, and problem solver, Paul Nichols has spent over a decade helping to build inclusive & inspiring communities. However, his most important professional realization came with the birth of his son. He noticed that the built form of large urban cores fail to provide the spaces and amenities required by young families, who are increasingly choosing to raise their children in these downtown environments. When not actively engaged in speaking, planning or community engagement, you can find Paul exploring his adopted home town of Hamilton, Ontario spending time with his family, and chasing after his son.
Mark Nickita
President, Archive Design Studio
Mark Nickita, AIA is an urbanist, architect, retail entrepreneur, developer, educator, an elected municipal leader and President of Archive DS, an award-winning, architectural and urban design firm in Detroit and Toronto. He has distinct expertise in the development, enhancement and the regeneration of existing, pedestrian-oriented urban environments including downtowns, neighborhoods, developed corridors, mixed-use areas and underutilized districts of post-industrial cities. Architectural projects include adaptive-reuse, historic rehabilitation and new infill buildings in a variety of cities as well as educational facilities, loft housing, office and retail projects, typically on challenging urban sites that require unique design solutions. His urban design projects include large scale redevelopment master plans, mixed-use corridor strategies, non-motorized and transit infrastructure planning, including the Detroit Citywide Non-Motorized Plan and the Woodward Avenue Bus Rapid Transit Alternative Analysis. With the goal of building and enhancing Places for people, he has resided and traveled to over 400 major cities throughout the world in order to better understand architecture, design and urban issues. Mark is a City Commissioner, current Mayor Pro-Tem and has served as Mayor of Birmingham, Michigan and is also co-owner of urban retail establishments in Downtown Detroit, including the Pure Detroit Stores, Workshop, the Rowland Cafe and Stella Cafes.
Karlene Nielson
Community Coordinator, Ford City Neighborhood Renewal
Karlene Nielsen lives and works in the Ford City Neighborhood for Drouillard Place as the Community Coordinator for their United Way funded neighborhood engagement strategy the Ford City Neighborhood Renewal. Karlene graduated from the School of Social Work at the University of Windsor from their Masters Program in 2010 and holds an undergraduate degree in Criminology/Sociology. Karlene specializes in resident engagement and neighborhood safety initiatives.Karlene is a self-proclaimed "nosy neighbor" who can often be found walking in the neighborhood, digging in the community garden, volunteering at a neighborhood event and getting into conversations with residents that prevent her from staying on top of the dishes and laundry at home.
Lisa Nisenson
Co-Founder, GreaterPlaces
Lisa Nisenson has worked for almost 20 years in environmental protection and smart growth. She undertook urban planning as a citizen activist, an interest that grew as her neighborhood adopted aggressive sustainability goals. As a policy analyst for the U.S. EPA, she expanded her work to include federal policy on watershed planning, transit oriented development, community planning and climate change policy. For the past three years, Ms. Nisenson has worked with a wide array of clients, including the California Water Board, the California Ocean Protection Commission and for US EPA developing Post-Construction guidance for Stormwater rules. She is currently the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Coordinator for Sarasota County, with responsibility for aligning economic development, planning and energy policies and programs.
Nathan Norris
CEO, Downtown Lafayette
Lisa Nuszkowski
Executive Director , Detroit Bike Share
Lisa Nuszkowski has more than a decade of experience working in community and economic development in Detroit. As Executive Director of Detroit Bike Share with the Downtown Detroit Partnership, she is working on the launch of Detroit’s first public bike share system. Prior to this, she worked on urban mobility initiatives, real estate development projects, and public safety enhancements as Senior Project Administrator in Wayne State University’s Office of Economic Development. Lisa has served in two City of Detroit administrations, as Chief of Staff to former House Majority Floor Leader in the Michigan legislature, and as Director of the Michigan Foreclosure Task Force, a nonprofit, statewide coalition focused on advocating for stronger foreclosure mitigation strategies and consumer protection policies. Lisa sits on the board of directors for Southwest Housing Solutions, an affordable housing and community developer in Southwest Detroit, and the Tour de Troit, a nonprofit organization that promotes healthy living through running, bicycling and bicycle safety. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Central Michigan University and a Master of Public Policy from the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. Lisa was a 2011 Marshall Memorial Fellow with the U.S. German Marshall Fund and a member of the Detroit Regional Chamber’s Leadership Detroit Class of XXXIV.
Dara O'Byrne
Deputy Director, Land Use & Policy, Detroit Future City
Dara O’Byrne serves as Deputy Director for Land Use and Policy for the Detroit Future City (DFC) Implementation Office, where she is working on reforming policy and regulations in Detroit, with a focus on land use. At DFC she has worked on initiatives focused on updating the City’s Master Plan of Policies and on advocating for an innovative open space network in Detroit. Dara’s role at DFC is a natural extension of her most recent position as a Detroit Revitalization Fellow working in the City of Detroit Planning and Development Department. During her fellowship, Dara worked on a number of planning initiatives including managing the traditional main street overlay design standards update, creating a community planning guidebook, and facilitating updates to the city’s zoning ordinance. Prior to working at the City, Dara lived in Seattle for nearly 10 years, where she worked as a consultant at Makers Architecture and Urban Design. Her work covered a broad spectrum of issues affecting local quality of life, ranging from land use and zoning to urban design and environmental policy. In her role at Makers, Dara led the Renton City Center Community Plan, which won the Governor’s Smart Community Award in 2012.
Ray Oldenburg
Professor Emeritus, Department of Sociology , University of West Florida in Pensacola, FL
Ray Oldenburg, Ph.D., is Professor Emeritus at the Department of Sociology at the University of West Florida in Pensacola. He is best known for writing The Great Good Place. He works as a consultant to entrepreneurs, community and urban planners, churches, and others seeking to establish great good places. His most recent assignments were for Consumer Eyes, Inc, New York in 2002, and San Jose, California’s CIRCA 2002 group. He has been invited to speak at symposia and conferences across the US, including at the Urban City Research Conference 2003 in Stockholm, Sweden.
Oldenburg holds a Bachelor of English and Social Studies from Mankato State University, Minnesota, and a Master and PhD in Sociology from the University of Minnesota. He held positions at the University of West Florida from 1971 to 2001, prior to which he taught and researched at the University of Nevada, Stout State University, and the University of Minnesota. Oldenburg also worked as an elementary and high school teacher, and as a dental technician in the U.S. Army Medical Corps.
Edward Orlowski
Associate Professor, Lawrence Technological University
Edward M. Orlowski is an Associate Professor of Architecture at Lawrence Technological University, and the former Chair of the Department. He holds a BS in Architecture from Lawrence Institute of Technology, and a Master of Architecture from the University of Michigan. He has been a licensed architect in the state of Michigan since 1996, and has practiced with firms such as Luckenbach | Ziegelman, (where he participated in the design of the AIA-award-winning Environmental Interpretive Center at the University of Michigan-Dearborn) and the SmithGroup. He was the creator of the first studio related to the topic of sustainability at Lawrence Tech, and has overseen its growth and development. In addition, he has created and directs a graduate-level design studio focusing upon architectural practice within a model of activism. He is a member of the American Institute of Architects, Architecture for Humanity-Detroit, the SEED Network, and Architects, Planners, and Designers for Social Responsibility. He is a member of the Board of Directors for the Association for Community Design. On campus he is the faculty advisor for the LTU Chapter of Habitat for Humanity, and is a faculty fellow of the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity. He has presented papers to numerous conferences both in the United States and abroad on sustainability and activist design paradigms.
Robert Orr, FAIA, LEED
Principal, Robert Orr & Associates LLC
Robert Orr is a 7th generation Hoosier and an award-winning architect and planner present at the first sip of coffee that became the grounds for the New Urbanism in the mid-1970s. His collaboration with Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk at Seaside, Florida in 1982 was honored by Time Magazine as "...the most astonishing design achievement of its era and one might hope the most influential." Robert's firm furnished more than 6,000 hours services, most pro-bono, to storm-ravaged Gulf Coast Mississippi and New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. Robert received his M.Arch. from Yale and his B.A. (History) from UVM. Robert lives with his wife and four children in New Haven, Connecticut.
Eric Osth, AIA
Principal, Urban Design Associates
Eric Osth is an Principal at Urban Design Associates (UDA) in Pittsburgh, PA. Eric has been educated in, and practiced both architecture and urban design. Eric earned a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Miami with honors and a Master of Urban Design from the University of California, Berkeley. He has worked for Merrill & Pastor Architects in Vero Beach, Florida where he served as a designer, project manager and illustrator. Eric illustrated over 100 perspective renderings for the office. At Senior Urban Designer at Skidmore Owings & Merrill, LLP in San Francisco, Eric directed an urban design team on projects in California and Shanghai, China. In his current role at UDA, Eric serves as a Principal-in-Charge for Urban Design and Architecture projects. In addition to directing design teams, he is a proponent of design exploration through a combination of traditional drawing techniques and digital media. Eric has taught as a Visiting Design Critic at the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art in New York City and as a Lecturer in Urban Design at University of California, Berkeley. Eric is a registered architect in Florida, Pennsylvania and Utah. He currently serves as a Board Member of AIA Pennsylvania and as Past President of AIA Pittsburgh.
Delma Palma
Architectural and Urban Designer, Torti Gallas and Partners
Delma Palma has been at Torti Gallas and Partners for two years, after graduating from the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture. Throughout her time at TGP, she has been involved in multiple projects going through the rigorous public process of entitlement in cities such as DC, Richmond, and Arlington. She currently lives in Washington, DC.
Peter Park
Professional Planner, Peter J. Park LLC
Peter J. Park was appointed Denver’s Manager of Community Planning and Development on January 14, 2004. The Community Planning and Development Department is comprised of more than 200 employees that provide Denver’s planning, zoning, construction permit and inspection services. He was formerly the City Planning Director in Milwaukee, Wisconsin where he was instrumental in establishing a disciplined approach to comprehensive planning, raising awareness of design, creating the Milwaukee Development Center (consolidating planning, zoning and construction permit functions), streamlining development review procedures and completing a comprehensive update of the city’s zoning code. Mr. Park also holds an appointment at the University of Colorado at Denver as an Associate Professor of Urban Design and Director of the Master of Urban Design Program. He was formerly an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee School of Architecture and Urban Planning where he coordinated the Joint Master of Architecture/Master of Urban Planning Degree Program and taught urban design lectures and studios. The work explored in his design studios influenced significant development activities in Milwaukee including the removal of an elevated downtown freeway that makes way for more than 25 acres of new development. Mr. Park has specialized in urban design and planning work requiring innovative design solutions that balance development needs with unique site and design quality concerns. He has worked with a variety of organizations dealing with regional planning, neighborhood planning, urban design, design guidelines and building renovation. Mr. Park has lectured at various institutions including the University of Chicago, Harvard Graduate School of Design, Marquette University, University of Montreal, and the University of Tokyo. He has also spoken to numerous local and national organizations including the American Institute of Architects (AIA), American Planning Association (APA), American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA), Congress for New Urbanism (CNU), Council for Urban Economic Development (CUED) and Urban Land Institute (ULI). Mr. Park co-authored The Wisconsin State Building Program Research Project: A Comparative Analysis and edited Growth Management and Environmental Quality.
Daniel Parolek, AIA
Principal, Opticos Design, Inc.
Daniel is an architect and urbanist who has worked with cities and towns of all sizes around the world to create vibrant, urban visions that reinforce the unique character of a place and that support local economies. A recent Next City article—titled “Will U.S. Cities Design Their Way Out of the Affordable Housing Crisis?”—referred to Daniel as “that guy” who coined the term Missing Middle Housing, which intelligently addresses housing issues in cities across the country. He is also at the forefront of rethinking the way we zone our communities to promote more compact, walkable, and vibrant places. In 2007, he co-authored the book Form-Based Codes and, in 2013, as part of a larger sustainable growth strategy in partnership with the Prince’s Foundation for Building Community, he wrote the first development code for Gabon, Africa. He serves as a board member for the Form-Based Codes Institute, an organization dedicated to reforming zoning to remove barriers for urban development, and for TransForm, which promotes walkable communities and transportation choices to connect people of all incomes to opportunity. His company, Opticos Design, is a founding B Corporation, a revolutionary new kind of business dedicated to economic, social, and environmental sustainability. His love of good urbanism springs from a childhood spent exploring the vibrant downtown of Columbus, Nebraska on his bike.
Karen Parolek
Principal, Opticos Design, Inc
Manuel Pastor
Director, USC Program for Environmental and Regional Equity
Dr. Manuel Pastor is Professor of Sociology and American Studies & Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. Founding director of the Center for Justice, Tolerance, and Community at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Pastor currently directs the Program for Environmental and Regional Equity (PERE) at USC and USC's Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration (CSII). He holds an economics Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and is the inaugural holder of the Turpanjian Chair in Civil Society and Social Change at USC.
Frank Perissinotti
Professor, St. Clair College
Frank Perissinotti is a professor of Architectural Technology at St. Clair College in Windsor Ontario Canada. Frank has a Bachelor of Technology Degree in Architecture from Ryerson University and a Master’s Degree in Education from Central Michigan University. He has taught numerous courses in the past 27 years as a professor at St. Clair College including the History of Local Architecture. Within the curriculum of that course, he has conducted many walking tours of neighborhoods within the cities of Detroit and Windsor. Frank also sits on committees that promote local Architectural History and Heritage. He is a director in the Windsor Doors Open committee which promotes local heritage by coordinating the opening of private buildings to allow public tours in historically significant buildings. He is also a member of the Sandwich Towne Legacy Committee which has a mandate to preserve its rich history in Windsor Ontario.
Matthew Petty
Principal, Fayetteville Infill Group
Matthew Petty serves on the City Council and develops missing middle real estate projects in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Now in his eighth year as an Alderman, Matthew has focused on simplifying the development process, building in flexibility for experimental entrepreneurs, and changing transportation planning culture within the local government. His company, Infill Group, performs financial, entitlement, and site design consultation in addition to developing multi-family and mixed-use projects on small sites.
Eve Picker
President & Founder, Small Change
Eve Picker's world is wrapped around cities and change. With a background as an architect, city planner, urban designer, real estate developer, community development strategist, publisher, and instigator, Eve employs a rich understanding of how cities and urban neighborhoods work - and how they can be revitalized. Her latest urban (ad)venture is Small Change, a real estate equity crowdfunding portal to help fund transformational real estate projects.
Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk
Principal, DPZ Partners
Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, F.A.I.A., is a founding principal of town planning firm Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company (DPZ) and was dean of the University of Miami’s School of Architecture for 18 years. Having initiated the graduate program in Suburb and Town Design in 1988, Elizabeth continues to explore current issues in city growth and reconstruction with students and faculty. She has served as Director of the Center for Urban Community and Design, organizing and promoting numerous design exercises for the benefit of communities throughout South Florida. Plater-Zyberk is a founder and emerita board member of the Congress for the New Urbanism, and has authored two books, Suburban Nation: the Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream and The New Civic Art.
Scott Polikov
President, President, Gateway Planning Group
President of the Gateway Planning Group, Scott is a town planner who started his professional life practicing law with Patton Boggs in Washington, D.C. Returning to Texas, he was appointed Director of the State’s Alternative Fuels Program and served on the Board of Directors respectively for Capital Metro Transit Authority in Austin and the regional metropolitan planning organization (MPO). Alarmed that the MPO’s transportation plan ignored the urban form and sustainable development patterns, Scott channeled his frustration by changing careers and establishing a national planning practice focusing on the marriage of place-making and the economics of multimodal transportation. His team’s practice has integrated the form-based approach into the creation of walkable mixed use employment centers, including projects in the greater Salt Lake City Region and Dallas/Fort Worth. In parallel his team has been focusing on the reinvention and activation of historic town centers in a contemporary market context, including places such as Owensboro, Kentucky, Rogers, Arkansas and McKinney, Texas. Gateway Planning’s awards include the Form-Based Codes Institute’s inaugural Driehaus Award for Best Form-Based Code.
Scott also serves on the Board of Directors of the Form-Based Code Institute (FBCI) and as an associate of the CitiStates Group founded by Neal Peirce. In 2016, Scott was nominated and selected to become a Fellow of the American Institute of Certified Planners (FAICP).
Stefanos Polyzoides
Principal, Moule & Polyzoides Architects & Urbanists
Stefanos Polyzoides was born and educated in Athens, Greece, and later earned B.A. and M.A. degrees in Architecture and Planning from Princeton University. His career has engaged a broad span of architecture and urbanism, its history, theory, education and design. He is a cofounder of the Congress for the New Urbanism and, with his wife Elizabeth Moule, a partner in Moule & Polyzoides, a Pasadena, California practice since 1990. From 1973 until 1997, he was an Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Southern California. His professional experience includes the design of educational, institutional, commercial and civic buildings, historic rehabilitation, housing, and the urban design of university campuses, neighborhoods and districts. Mr. Polyzoides has led such projects throughout the United States and around the world, in Canada, South America, Australia, China and the Middle East. He is the co author of Los Angeles Courtyard Housing: A Typological Analysis (1977), The Plazas of New Mexico (2012), and the author of R.M. Schindler, Architect (1982), and the forthcoming Between House and Tower: The Architecture of Density. He also led on the production of four distinguished exhibitions and exhibition catalogs on the architectural and urban history of Southern California: Caltech: 1910–1950, Myron Hunt: 1868–1952, Wallace Neff, and Johnson, Kaufmann & Coate.
Laura Poncelet
Architect, Torti Gallas & Partners
Laura Poncelet is a recently licensed architect at Torti Gallas and Partners. She holds a degree from the University of Miami School of Architecture where she developed an interest in New Urbanism and became CNU-Accredited. She currently enjoys biking and living in Washington, DC.
Shelley R. Poticha
Director, Urban Solutions, Urban Program, Natural Resource Defense Council
Shelley Poticha serves as the director of the Urban Solutions program, building NRDC’s work for better cities that support thriving people. Urban Solutions brings the place-based work of NRDC together into a coordinated strategy and includes promoting transportation choices through mobility options, scaling up building energy efficiency, model green and equitable neighborhoods, sustainable food systems, green infrastructure and climate preparedness. Urban Solutions is the culmination of NRDC’s thinking and work for sustainable communities since the organization adopted the area as an institutional priority.
Russell S. Preston
Design Director, Principle Group
Russell Preston is founder of Principle Group, a planning, design, and development firm focused on creating authentic places. He has worked as a designer and urbanist since 1999 on a variety of public and private projects throughout the United States and is currently developing several mixed use infill buildings in the greater Boston region. A national thought leader, he has contributed to the Tactical Urbanism guides and is editor of “Living Urbanism”, a publication on contemporary urban design and city building. He currently serves as a Commissioner of Boston’s Air Pollution Control Commission and is on the board of directors of the Congress for the New Urbanism and Boston’s South End Washington Gateway Mainstreet. Prior to founding Principle Group, Preston worked with Cornish Associates on the redevelopment of Downcity, Providence and Mashpee Commons, a mixed-use neighborhood on Cape Cod. In 2010 he received the Faculty Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Profession from the University of Miami. Preston is also a working artist and illustrator.
Michaele Pride
Professor & Associate Dean for Public Outreach and Engagement, School of Architecture and Planning, University of New Mexico
Michaele Pride, AIA, NOMA, Professor & Associate Dean for Public Outreach and Engagement, School of Architecture and Planning, University of New Mexico Michaele is a professor of Architecture at the University of New Mexico. Prior to 2011, she was at the University of Cincinnati, where she served as the Director of the School of Architecture and Interior Design from 2003-09. As an architect and urban designer, she emphasizes principles of consensus, collaboration and public engagement in her teaching, research and professional consulting. After the 1992 civil unrest in Los Angeles, Michaele helped found the Design Professionals’ Coalition, offering assistance to neglected communities of South LA. She left private practice in Los Angeles to become the inaugural Director of the Downtown Design Center at the University of Kentucky in 1996. Michaele is on the Board of Trustees of the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center, and serves on the Design Review Committee for the Sawmill Community Land Trust.
Lee-Michael Pronko
Co-Founder, Strategist, Milieu
Lee-Michael J. Pronko is a co- founder of Milieu and Atelier Ruderal. He is completing his Master in Political Science at Carleton University. Previously, he studied Philosophy at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, in Belgium, while completing an undergraduate degree in Humanities and Philosophy. His research explores the role of citizens in the urban planning and development process. He re-imagines how cities manage extensive knowledge that contributes to better urban planning and development decisions by deploying new digital tools that inform and engage people.
Stephanie Reed Zurek
Associate, Union Studio
Stephanie is an Associate at Union Studio Architecture and Community Design, in Providence, RI, where she has worked on a range of residential and commercial projects. Her project background includes a number of affordable housing developments and a new public library. In the summer of 2011 Stephanie received a LeBrun Travel Grant from the Center for Architecture in New York City, which enabled her to travel to Indonesia to study urban villages. She received her Bachelor’s of Architecture from the University of Notre Dame and is currently pursuing a Master's of Sustainable Urban Development from the University of Oxford.
Lynn Richards
President & CEO, CNU
Lynn Richards is President and CEO of the Congress for the New Urbanism. Previously, Richards had a long and distinguished career at the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), holding multiple leadership roles over 13 years including Acting Director and Policy Director in the Office of Sustainable Communities. She worked with dozens of state and local governments to implement placemaking approaches by developing policies, urban design strategies, and environmental solutions for vibrant, prosperous neighborhoods. Additionally, she produced groundbreaking research on water and land use strategies. Before joining the EPA, Richards worked briefly in the private sector at a consulting firm. She lived and worked in the former Soviet Republics from 1988 to 1995, helping environmental groups increase their organizational and political effectiveness. Richards was awarded a Loeb Fellowship in Advanced Environmental Studies at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design in the 2012-2013 school year. She has a dual Masters in Environmental Science and Public Affairs from Indiana University.
Joseph Riley
Former Mayor, City of Charleston
Joe Riley was first elected mayor of Charleston in December 1975, and went on to serve an unprecedented ten terms. During Riley's forty-year tenure as mayor, the City of Charleston saw a substantial decrease in crime, a revitalization of the historic downtown business district, the creation and growth of Spoleto Festival U.S. A., an expansion of the city's park system, and the development of nationally-acclaimed affordable housing. An important part of Riley's legacy will be his leadership prior to and during the aftermath of the Emanuel Nine shooting; Mayor Riley spent his entire public service career building bridges among diverse sectors of the community, which many consider important groundwork that aided the city's response to the tragedy. At the end of his final term as Mayor in January of 2016, he joined the faculty of The Citadel as the first occupant of an endowed Professorship of American Government & Public Policy created in his honor with the mission of documenting, and teaching, lessons of principled, bipartisan, and effective leadership in pursuit of excellence for the public good.
Chad Rochkind
Founder & Principal, Human Scale Studio
Chad Rochkind is the Founder and Principal of Human Scale Studio. He is a Knight 880 Cities Fellow, and one of Metropolis Magazine’s ""10 New Talents"". Chad holds a Master's Degree in Historical and Sustainable Architecture from NYU, where he graduated at the top of his class. Chad's work is currently focused on helping Corktown become a more walkable and vibrant neighborhood, through a combination of tactical urbanism projects and long-term planning. In 2015, Chad installed a parklet on Michigan Avenue that received national media exposure and started a citywide conversation about the future of Detroit’s streets. He also project managed Symphony in D, a yearlong collaboration between the MIT Media Lab, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, and the people of Detroit, which was covered by the New York Times and the BBC for its innovative approach to community engagement.
Mark Roderick
Attorney, Flaster-Greenberg, P.C.
Markley Roderick concentrates his practice on the representation of entrepreneurs and their businesses. He represents companies across a wide range of industries, including technology, real estate, and healthcare. Expanding on his in-depth knowledge of capital raising and securities law, Mark is one of the leading crowdfunding lawyers in the United States, and has spent more than 30 years representing entrepreneurs and their businesses in a wide variety of transactions.
Jonathan F.P. Rose
President, Jonathan Rose Companies LLC
Jonathan F.P. Rose’s business, public policy and not-for-profit work all focus on creating more environmentally, socially and economically resilient cities. In 1989, Mr. Rose founded Jonathan Rose Companies LLC, a multi-disciplinary real estate development, planning, and investment firm which has successfully completed more than $1.5 billion of work. In 2005, the firm launched the nation’s first green transit oriented acquisition and redevelopment fund, followed by several green affordable housing and office transformation funds.
Janette Sadik-Khan
Principal, Bloomberg Associates
Janette Sadik-Khan is one of the world’s foremost authorities on transportation and urban transformation. She served as New York City’s transportation commissioner from 2007 to 2013 under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, overseeing historic changes to New York City’s streets—closing Broadway to cars in Times Square, building nearly 400 miles of bike lanes and creating more than 60 plazas citywide. A founding principal with Bloomberg Associates, she works with mayors around the world to reimagine and redesign their cities. She chairs the National Association of Transportation Officials, implementing new, people-focused street design standards, which have been adopted in 40 cities across the continent.
Andrew Salzberg
Global Mobility Policy Lead, Uber
As Uber’s Global Mobility Policy Lead, Andrew focuses on making Uber an integral part of the future of urban transportation through research, partnerships, and policy development. He joined Uber in 2013 and became the Senior Operations Manager for New York City, Uber’s largest global market, before joining the global policy team. Prior to joining Uber, Andrew worked at the World Bank supporting public transportation investment projects in East Asia. He holds a bachelor of civil engineering degree from McGill University and Master in Urban Planning degree from Harvard University. While at Harvard, Andrew worked at Transport for London through MIT's Transit Research Lab using smartcard transaction data for bus network planning.
Richard Sammons
Architect & Urbanist, Fairfax & Sammons Architects
Richard has a rich background in traditional period design and is well known for his work in architectural proportion, having taught at The Prince of Wales's Institute of Architecture in London and The Institute of Classical Architecture and the Pratt Institute in New York. He established Fairfax & Sammons Architects, P.C. over twelve years ago with Anne Fairfax, his partner in marriage as well as business. With offices in New York and Palm Beach, the firm has grown to some twenty members, and is committed to an architecture of both tradition and innovation.
Ben Schulman
Communications Director, Small Change
Ben Schulman serves as the communications director for Small Change, one of many ventures he engages in to communicate the value of design and cities. He is the editor of the Design section of Newcity Chicago, host of the "A Lot You Got to Holler" podcast on architecture, urbanism and design, and a writer on urban affairs. Previously, Schulman served as the communications director for the Chicago chapter of The American Institute of Architects, editor of Chicago Architect magazine and as communications director for the urban think-tank, the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU). Ben’s writing has appeared and been noted in outlets such as ARCHITECT Magazine, Belt Magazine, ICON, New Geography, Streetsblog, The National Review, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Pop City Media and as a contributor to The Urbanophile, among others. He’s presented at The World Association of Public Opinion Research, the Great Books Foundation and the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, and lectured for Planetizen Courses, the educational platform for the premier urban planning news website.
Bill Schultheiss
Principal Engineer, Toole Design Group
Bill Schultheiss is a principal with Toole Design Group headquartered in Silver Spring, Maryland and a national leader in sustainable safety and complete street design. He has focused his career on the transformation of unsafe, automobile-dominated communities into equitable places that provide people options to travel safely and comfortably by walking, bicycling, or taking transit. He helps communities understand the vital role transportation and land-use policies have in improving or harming quality of life, health, safety, economic development, and mobility. Over the course of his career he has helped Toole Design Group transform the Cities of Boston, Seattle, and Washington, DC into leading bicycle and pedestrian friendly communities. Other notable projects he has helped to produce include the Massachusetts Department of Transportation Separated Bike Lane Design Guide, the Boston Complete Streets Design Guide, Safe Routes to School, Pedestrian, and Bicycle Master Plans for the City of Seattle, the design of the Pennsylvania Avenue Bicycle Lanes, and the AASHTO Bicycle Planning & Design Guide. He is a member of the Bicycle Technical Committee of the National Committee on Uniform Traffic Control Devices and he holds a BS in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Northeastern University in Boston.
Cailin Shannon
Senior Designer, Opticos Design, Inc
Cailin Shannon’s artistic sense and fascination with vernacular architecture make her a versatile, sensitive designer skilled in visioning and placemaking. Her colorful, inspiring illustrations give form to a community’s aspirations and goals, while merging traditional art techniques with new digital technologies. By identifying the nuances of each community’s character, Cailin creates contextual designs for diverse places across the United States and around the world, from the tribal communities of Northern California’s Trinidad Rancheria, to the colorful, historic streetcar neighborhoods of Cincinnati, OH, to the tropical urban environment in Gabon, Africa.
Breanna Shell
Planner, City of Huntington, WV
Breanna is the Planner for the City of Huntington, WV. Breanna graduated in 2011 from the University of Michigan Master in Urban Planning program and has been with the City Planning department since Summer 2012. Breanna took the lead on an in-house revision to the City’s comprehensive Plan update, Plan2025, concluding with a unanimous approval by the Planning Commission and City Council in December of 2013. In addition, Breanna enforces the zoning ordinance, provides administrative assistance to the Planning Commission and Board of Zoning Appeals and participates in several community supported revitalization projects.
Terry Shook, FAIA
Founding Partner and Principal, Shook Kelley, Inc.
Charles Terry Shook, FAIA, is a founding partner and principal of Shook Kelley, a firm specializing in strategic consulting services, melding consumer psychographic analysis, branding, architecture, planning and communication design into one united practice. Mr. Shook focuses upon the creation of new communities, in both the suburbs and within urban cores, that reflect timeless patterns of building while responding to modern aspirations for a better life. As one of the nation's top experts in district planning and PlaceMarking, he has been recognized as a vanguard in the movement to return meaning to the urban environment.
Mitchell Silver, AICP
Commissioner, NYC Parks, City of New York
Mitchell J. Silver became Commissioner of the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation in May 2014. Commissioner Silver is also the immediate past president of the American Planning Association (APA). He is an award-winning planner with almost 30 years of experience and he is internationally recognized for his leadership in the planning profession and his contributions to contemporary planning issues. He specializes in comprehensive planning, place making and implementation strategies. As Parks Commissioner, Mitchell Silver oversees management, planning and operations of nearly 30,000 acres of parkland, which includes parks, playgrounds, beaches, marinas, recreation centers, wilderness areas and other assets. Prior to returning to his native New York City as Parks Commissioner, he served as the Chief Planning & Development Officer and Planning Director for Raleigh, NC. His career has included roles as a policy and planning director for New York City’s Department of Planning, a principal of a New York City-based planning firm, a town manager in New Jersey, and deputy planning director in Washington, DC.
John Simmerman
Co-Founder, President & CEO, Active Towns
I'm a health promotion professional and entrepreneur with 25+ years of experience. My primary focus is on getting more people moving on a daily basis by helping create communities that support healthy, active lifestyles. Personally, I strive to lead by example by walking and biking to meet most of my daily needs and competing, just for fun, in triathlons and running events on a semi regular basis, which also helps to keep me motivated, focussed and fit. I also enjoy serving as a professional race announcer, mostly of the endurance athletic type such as triathlons and running events.
Daniel K. Slone, Esquire
Partner, McGuireWoods LLP
Daniel K. Slone is a partner of McGuireWoods LLP in Richmond, VA. Dan assists innovative clients in designing and implementing their projects. He helps to create the right entities, put together the appropriate strategies, overcome impediments, and put together effective contracts for the new types of relationships they create including for green businesses and developers, localities, professionals, and non-profit organizations. He has been a member of the Board of Directors for the Congress for the New Urbanism since 2011 and was a Charter Member, General Council from 1992-2010. Dan is a graduate of the University of Michigan Law School and the Birmingham Southern College with BA Degrees in Philosophy and Political Science. He co-authored A Legal Guide to Urban and Sustainable Development for Architects, Planners and Developers with Doris Goldstein (John Wiley & Sons, September 2008). He is the Recipient of the Henry David Thoreau Environmental Conservator, Better Housing Coalition 2010 Groundbreaker Award and Special Recognition for Service Award from the Virginia Sustainable Building Network in 2006.
Lee Sobel
Principal, Director of Public Strategies, RCLCO
Lee Sobel is RCLCO’s Director of Public Strategies, a position that blends his expertise in real estate and finance with his knowledge of land use and transportation policy. He has been a commercial real estate broker with CB Richard Ellis, in South Florida, and he spent 10 years handling real estate development and finance matters with the U.S. EPA’s Office of Sustainable Communities in Washington, D.C. He is a recognized expert in urban retail, market analysis, economic development, and smart growth. During Lee’s tenure in the public sector, he provided technical assistance, policy research and development, and implementation strategies to local governments, quasi-governmental entities, community groups, and national and local advocacy organizations on real estate, finance, and economic development issues with the goal of achieving sustainable community development. At the EPA, Lee authored and co-authored publications that reflect this work, including Infrastructure Financing Options for Transit-Oriented Development, Smart Growth and Economic Success, Market Acceptance of Smart Growth, and This Is Smart Growth. At CB Richard Ellis, Lee brokered the acquisition and disposition of land, retail, and office properties for institutional, national, and private clients. He also provided opinions of value and market analytics for positioning and repositioning income properties. While a broker, Lee authored the first book dedicated to redeveloping shopping malls into mixed-use town centers, Greyfields into Goldfields: Dead Malls Become Living Neighborhoods.
Daniel Solomon
Principal, Mithun | Solomon
Daniel Solomon is an architect and urban designer whose 44-year career combines achievements in professional practice with academic pursuits of teaching and writing. His projects have been published in architectural journals worldwide and have been recognized with more than eighty-five awards. The main focus of his work has been residential architecture and the interaction between housing and urban design. From this base his work has expanded in several directions including large-scale urban planning, regulatory structures that govern urban design and residential, commercial, and institutional architecture. He is the author of many articles and three books: ReBuilding, Global City Blues, and Cosmopolis. A fourth book Attack of the Slab Monsters is nearing completion. As one of the co-founders of the Congress for the New Urbanism, Daniel Solomon's commitment to urban repair and the construction and reconstruction of urban neighborhoods extends beyond his project work and writing.
Jeremy Sommer
Architect & Urbanist, Sommer Design Studios
Jeremy is an architect and educator based in Georgia. He worked for several prominent New Urbanist architectural firms for several years, then pursued and received a graduate degree in Classical Design in 2009, which led to the founding of his own firm. His award-winning work can be found both in the US and abroad. He has been highly involved with the New Urbanism since college, and is a founding member of the Atlanta Chapter of the CNU.
Jeff B. Speck, CNU-A, AICP, LEED AP, Honorary ASLA
Principal, Speck & Associates LLC
Jeff Speck is a city planner and urban designer who, through writing, lectures, and built work, advocates internationally for smart growth and sustainable design. As Director of Design at the National Endowment for the Arts from 2003 through 2007, he oversaw the Mayors' Institute on City Design and created the Governors' Institute on Community Design, a federal program that helps state governors fight suburban sprawl. Prior to joining the Endowment, Mr. Speck spent ten years as Director of Town Planning at Duany Plater-Zyberk and Co., a leading practitioner of the New Urbanism, where he led or managed more than forty of the firm's projects. He is the co-author of Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream as well as The Smart Growth Manual. He serves as a Contributing Editor to Metropolis Magazine, and on the Sustainability Task Force of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. His recent book, Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time –which the Christian Science Monitor called “timely and important, a delightful, insightful, irreverent work” – was the best-selling planning/design title of 2013.
Scot Spencer
Associate Director, Advocacy & Influence, Annie E. Casey Foundation
Scot Spencer leads the Foundation’s work in advancing community-focused policies, practices and strategies that increase opportunities for children, families and the places where they live and foster their success. Spencer also coordinates Casey’s local advocacy efforts in Baltimore. Before taking on these roles, Spencer managed Casey’s investments in East Baltimore, where the Foundation seeks to strengthen community and economic development in a historic, low-income neighborhood next door to the Johns Hopkins University medical campus. He previously was a transportation specialist at the Environmental Defense Fund, where he focused on state-level smart-growth policy and Commuter Choice, a local tax incentive for people who use transit. He also served as deputy director for Historic East Baltimore Community Action Coalition. There, he led the federal Bridges to Work demonstration, which provided job training and placement services for residents in East and West Baltimore, as well as transportation from their neighborhoods to employment centers in the suburbs. In addition, he worked for several years in private architectural practice, community development and university relations in upstate New York.
Monique St. Pierre
Architectural Designer, Milieu
Monique moved to Ottawa from a rural community to pursue an Undergraduate degree in International Development and Globalization, at the University of Ottawa. During this time her study focused on Human Rights, enabling her to intern and volunteer with various NGO's both locally and internationally. Her connection to the public, while taking a different direction, has been further developed in her current pursuit of a Master's of Architecture degree from Carleton University. She seeks to further explore the connection that different tools of engagement can offer -- both in her academic pursuits and in the development of Milieu -- to an evolving sphere of public consultation.
Paddy Steinschneider
President & Founder, Gotham Design & Community Development Ltd.
Padriac Steinschneider is a placemaker, designer, and real estate developer. He is President of Gotham Design and Community Development, Ltd., a firm he founded in 1978 that seeks projects in village settings that focus on “healing the whole.” His interest in the restoration and adaptive reuse of properties has seen particular success with projects like Wit’s End in Dobbs Ferry and Wicker Park in Chicago. Paddy is very active in his local community, serving on Dobbs Ferry's Land Use Committee, the Mayor’s Task Force on Energy and the Environment, and Sustainable Westchester’s Transportation and Land Use Committee. An Environmental Science major at Columbia College, Paddy received his Masters in Architecture from Columbia University in 1976. With his personal philosophy of being locally involved, Paddy’s previously peripheral support for CNU was invigorated by the advent of chapters. He is a founding member of the New York Chapter and serves as the Chief Operations Officer for CNU New York.
Galina Tachieva, AICP
Partner, DPZ Partners
Galina Tachieva is an expert on urban redevelopment, sprawl retrofit, sustainable planning and form-based codes. As a partner at Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company, Architects and Town Planners (DPZ), Tachieva directs and manages the design and implementation of projects in the United States and around the world. She is the author of the Sprawl Repair Manual, published October, 2010 by Island Press. She is the primary author of the Sprawl Repair Module, a special application to the SmartCode, which enables the transformation of sprawl types into community patterns. Galina is one of the leaders of the CNU Sprawl Retrofit Initiative, a founding member of the Congress for European Urbanism, a member of the Transect Codes Council, a board member of the New Urban Guild Foundation, and is certified by the US Green Building Council as a LEED-accredited professional.
Alex Taranu
Manager, Architectural Design Services, City of Brampton
Alex is an urbanist, urban designer and architect with extensive experience in downtown revitalization, intensification and transit-oriented development, urban design, heritage, process and project management. Alex has managed Brampton’s Urban Design section for the many years with focus on Central Area planning and design, city-wide urban design, heritage preservation and special projects.
Alex is a founding member and director of the Council for Canadian Urbanism (CanU), founding member and past chair of Ontario Professional Planner’s Institute Urban Design Working Group. He has written articles for professional magazines, organized numerous events, and is a frequent lecturer on urban design. Alex has been elected as Fellow of the Canadian Institute of Planners in 2011 and received the OPPI Award in 2007 for his professional work within the planning profession.
Jonathan Tate
Architect/Urban Designer, Office of Jonathan Tate
Jonathan Tate is principal of OJT (Office of Jonathan Tate), an architecture and urban design practice in New Orleans. The office engages in numerous design-related activities, including applied research, opportunistic planning, strategic development and conventional architectural practice. Notable recently completed projects include 3106 St. Thomas, the first unit under the Starter Home* development agenda, which has received wide recognition, and Wetland Urbanism, a research and publication project that was exhibited at the 14th International Architecture Biennale in Venice.
June Thomas
Centennial Professor of Urban and Regional Planning, Taubman College, University of Michigan
June Manning Thomas, Ph.D., is Centennial Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. In 2003 she was inducted as a Fellow in the American Institute of Certified Planners. She is President of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (2013-15). Thomas writes about diversification of the planning profession, planning history, and social equity in neighborhoods and urban revitalization. Recent research assessed the role of minority-race planners in the quest for a just city, explored the relationship between the concept of social equity and the civil rights movement, and examined the land-use reactions of community organizations to vacant land in Detroit.
Jim Tischler
Community Development Policy Director , State of Michigan
James Tischler is Policy Director for the State of Michigan’s Community Development Division, where he is responsible for design of the State’s community development programs and development of statewide and neighborhood-focused policy. He has more than 25 years of experience in the field of urban planning, working for public organizations and consulting with private sector firms. Mr. Tischler holds a Master of Urban Planning degree from Wayne State University and is a graduate of the University of Oklahoma Economic Development Institute. In addition to registration with the American Institute of Certified Planners, he is a registered Michigan Professional Community Planner, a member of the American Planning Association and Michigan Association of Planning, and holds membership in the Congress for the New Urbanism.
Bruce B. Tolar, P.A.
Architect, Architect Bruce B. Tolar, P.A.
Bruce is one of the real heroes of the Katrina recovery. Living and working in the destruction zone, he did a number of extraordinary things, beginning with the creation of Cottage Court in Ocean Springs. There, he assembled the first several Katrina Cottages designed and built, then expanded the court to include several of the Mississippi Cottages. Later, he teamed with manufacturers of several types of newer cottages and has literally built a neighborhood out of what began as an aspiration for “FEMA trailers with dignity.”
Ray Tomalty
Principal, Smart Cities Research Services
Ray Tomalty, has been a consultant in urban sustainability for over 25 years, leading or otherwise participating in over 80 research projects. He has worked with governments, foundations and non-governmental organizations to explore every aspect of urban sustainability and help build Canada's emerging expertise on this topic. He is among the handful of researchers in Canada who have an integrated perspective on cities and their ecological, social and economic subsystems.
John Torti
President, Torti Gallas & Partners, Inc.
As President of Torti Gallas and Partners, Mr. Torti has provided the strong conceptual leadership to bring his firm to international recognition. His firm has been the recipient of over 100 prestigious national design awards in the last 20 years.With offices in Washington, DC, Silver Spring, Los Angeles, and Istanbul, he and his partners have built a firm that understands the inextricable relationship between placemaking, architecture, and sustainability.
Torti Gallas’ work achieves success for their clients and for the communities in which it is located. Mr. Torti joined the firm he now leads in 1973. Under his leadership, Torti Gallas and Partners has focused its practice on Trans National Urbanism, transit-oriented development, mixed use,mixed-income architecture, and human sustainability.Prior to joining Torti Gallas and Partners, Mr. Torti worked with NASA and the National Capital Planning Commission. He is a member of the Advisory Council for the School of Architecture at the University of Notre Dame. Mr. Tortiis a graduate of the University of Notre Dame with a Bachelor of Architecture degree. In 2004, Mr. Torti became a LEED Accredited Professional.
Jeffrey Tumlin
Principal, Nelson\Nygaard Consulting Associates
Jeffrey Tumlin is the director of strategy for Nelson\Nygaard, a transportation planning and engineering firm focused on sustainable, equitable mobility. His work helps communities move from discord to agreement about the future. For more than twenty years, Jeff has led award-winning plans in cities from Seattle and Vancouver to Moscow and Abu Dhabi. He helps balance all modes of transportation in complex places to achieve a community’s wider goals and best utilize their limited resources. He has developed transformative plans throughout the world that accommodate millions of square feet of growth with no net increase in motor vehicle traffic.
Michael Tunte
Landscape Architect and Urban Designer, Design Workshop
Michael Tunte is an associate, landscape architect and urban designer with Design Workshop. He has designed award-winning projects, lectured at universities and served as an adviser to numerous clients and communities. The scope of his interests is broad, from site design to the development of large urban areas, with a particular passion about the myriad ways communities use public space. Michael graduated from Michigan State University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Landscape Architecture as an ASLA Student Honor Award winner. He also holds a Master of Urban Design degree from the University of California-Berkeley, where he was a Gadsby Trudgett Scholarship recipient as well as a University of California Fellowship recipient.
Sydney VanKuren
Sustainable Urbanism Program Coordinator, Farr Associates
Sydney Blankers VanKuren is the Sustainable Urbanism Program Coordinator at Farr Associates. She focuses on sustainable urbanism projects including managing the production of the second edition of Sustainable Urbanism: Urban Design with Nature. Sydney has professional experience in biology, research analysis, science communication, and environmental planning and policy. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Natural Resources as well as a master’s degree in Urban Planning and Policy.
Paul Whalen, AIA
Partner, Robert A.M. Stern Architects LLP
Paul Whalen, Partner, Robert A.M. Stern Architects, has been responsible for the design and management of projects ranging from private residences to resorts, hotels, institutional buildings, and large-scale planning projects worldwide. Mr. Whalen's experience includes two of the most influential planning projects of our time: the new town of Celebration, Florida, and plan and guidelines that revived the theater block of New York City's 42nd Street, which won a 1999 Honor Award from the American Institute of Architects. His planning work also includes a new town for a brownfield site in the New Jersey Meadowlands; Del Sur Village, a new 135-acre mixed-use community in Southern California; and a resort village in New York State's Hudson Valley. Internationally, Mr. Whalen has planned seaside resorts in Europe and South America. His 450,000-square-foot mixed-use retail and residential urban infill project in Arnhem, the Netherlands, won a 2006 Charter Award from the Congress for the New Urbanism. The Grand Harbor courtyard house neighborhood in Vero Beach, Florida, was chosen by Builder Magazine as their 1989 Project of the Year and received a 1991 AIA National Honor Award. His current projects include a master plan and residential community in Xiamen, China, planning, residential and mixed-use projects in Asia and Europe, as well as a 2.5 million-square-foot mixed-use development in Uttar Pradesh, India. Mr. Whalen, a graduate of Columbia University, received his Master of Architecture from Princeton University in 1981. He is a member of the American Institute of Architects and the Board of Directors of the New York Chapter of the Congress for the New Urbanism.
Kara Wilbur
Urban Designer & Code Writer, Principle Group
Kara is a planner and urban designer with more than 10 years of national experience for both public and private sector clients. Prior to joining Principle Group in 2014, she worked for 8 years with Town Planning & Urban Design Collaborative, cultivating their New England practice. Her work has focused on revitalization of transitioning downtowns, redevelopment of outdated retail corridors, and common sense transportation plans that promote safety and economic value. She has also spearheaded a new generation of Comprehensive Plans as well as innovative form-based codes that open the door for high quality investment. Believing in the importance of bringing national best practices to the forefront of New England planning, Kara was a co-founder of the New England Chapter of the Congress for the New Urbanism in 2004 and served as the organization’s first president. She lives in Portland, Maine.
June Williamson
Associate Professor of Architecture - Spitzer School of Architecture, The City College of New York/CUNY
June Williamson, RA, LEED AP, is associate professor of architecture and urban design at the City College of New York, CUNY. She is co-author, with Ellen Dunham-Jones, of "Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs,” and author of “Designing Suburban Futures: New Models from Build a Better Burb.” Over a 20+ year career, she has practiced in New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Salt Lake City and Boston. A frequent speaker and consultant, her writing is published in the books “Retrofitting Sprawl,” “Social Justice in Diverse Suburbs,” “Independent for Life,” and "Writing Urbanism," as well as many journals, magazines and blogs.
Lawrence Williamson
Real Estate Manager, Midtown Detroit, Inc.
Mr. Williamson is the Real Estate Manager, who reports directly to the President, Susan Mosey at Midtown Detroit Inc., (MDI). MDI is a nonprofit planning, real estate and economic development organization that supports the physical maintenance and revitalization of Midtown Detroit, including New Center. He is responsible for economic development, commercial leasing, market research, public hearings and various real estate related project matters.
He has over thirty (30) years of experience covering the fields of, architecture, facilities management, consulting, construction administration, commercial leasing, economic and real estate development in the public, private and non-profit sectors. He has owned/developed, facilitated and managed more than $120 million in real estate projects and has consulted with more than fifty (50) units of government on real estate related projects.
Bucky Willis
Founder of Bleeding Heart Design. Detroit Collaborative Design Center, Designer/Project Manager
A native of Detroit, Rebecca “Bucky” Willis received her Master of Architecture degree from the University of Detroit Mercy (UDM). Bucky has worked for a number of non-profit organizations in Detroit, including Habitat for Humanity, Detroit Future City and the Detroit Collaborative Design Center (DCDC) at the University of Detroit Mercy School of Architecture. The heart of her career and research lies at the intersection where architecture and design meet social issues and emotional impact. This career and research focus inspired her to create the concept of Bleeding Heart Design - a design movement and non-profit that inspires altruism.
Bucky believes that artists, designers and architects should seek to improve humanity and solve social issues through design. Designers who embrace their social responsibilities are what she likes to call "design superheroes"!
Lisa Wise, AICP
President, Lisa Wise Consulting, Inc.
Lisa is the founder and President of Lisa Wise Consulting, Inc., a planning and economics firm founded in 2006. As a certified planner and public accountant, Lisa has almost 25 years of experience in land use planning, accounting, and finance. Lisa’s professional focus includes a commitment to inclusive and effective community engagement, comprehensive planning, development codes, affordable housing, economics, and managing complex projects. Examples from Lisa’s project experience include development code updates for the City of Cincinnati, the Cities of Livermore, CA, and Flagstaff (conventional and form-based hybrid codes), and Marin and Santa Barbara Counties, the update of the City of Ventura General Plan and Downtown Specific Plan and Form-Based Code, a City of Benicia, CA, Master Plan and Form-Based Code, the City of King, CA, Historic Corridor Revitalization Plan and Form-Based Code, the City of Kingsburg, CA, Development Code Update (conventional and form-based hybrid code), over 14 housing elements, inclusionary and employee housing studies, and financial feasibility studies for the Ports of San Diego and Long Beach.
Samir Younés
Professor, School of Architecture, University of Notre Dame
Prof. Samir Younés teaches traditional urbanism and architecture and architectural theory. Samir Younés’ professional experience in the United States and Europe includes a comprehensive variety of projects: long-term master-plans, mixed use developments, private residences, and commemorative monuments. In 1993, he designed the monument for the Cornerstone laying ceremony for the Bicentennial of the U.S. Capitol, Washington, D.C.. Younés taught architecture at the Catholic University of America from 1986 until 1991 when he joined the faculty at Notre Dame by teaching in the Rome Studies Program. He was subsequently Director of Graduate Studies (1993–1999), Director of the Rome Studies Program (1999–2008), and Rooney Director of Rome Studies (2006-2008). In 2001, Younés was member of the Founders’ Committee of the School of Architecture at the Universidade Católica Portuguesa, Viseu, Portugal. He was master–planner and senior tutor for the Prince of Wales’ urban task force for Lebanon in 1997. He lectured on architecture at the Universities of Bologna; and Ferrara, Italy; L’ Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, France; Univ. of Portsmouth UK; and juried projects at the Univ. of Miami (Rome), Univ. of Maryland, Catholic University, Clemson University (Genova), Univ. of Oregon (Rome), and Yale.
JJ Zanetta
Founder, Zanetta Illustration
Susan Zielinski
Managing Director, SMART (Sustainable Mobility & Accessibility Research & Transformation)
Sue Zielinski is one of the pioneers and leading experts on New Mobility, with consulting and public speaking experience in many countries. She is the Managing Director of SMART (Sustainable Mobility and Accessibility Research and Transformation) at the University of Michigan, as well as a Lecturer in Urban and Regional Planning. Just before joining SMART, Susan spent a year as a Harvard Loeb Fellow focusing on New Mobility innovation and leadership. Prior to 2004, she co-founded and directed Moving the Economy (MTE), a Canada-wide “link tank” that works to catalyze and support sustainable urban transportation innovation as well as New Mobility industry development, an integrated industry approach developed at MTE. As a transportation planner for the City of Toronto, she worked for over 15 years developing and leading transportation and liveability policies and initiatives. She has advised on a range of local, national, and international initiatives, including the National Advisory Committee on Energy Efficiency, Transport Canada’s Sustainable Development Advisory Committee, the Gridlock Panel of the Ontario Smart Growth Initiative, the OECD’s Environmentally Sustainable Transport (EST) Project, the King of Sweden’s jury of the Stockholm Partnerships for Sustainable Cities, and the European Conference of Ministers of Transport (ECMT). She was also a long-time board member of Canada’s Center for Sustainable Transportation and founding board member of the Green Tourism Association.