Ricky Burdett is Professor of Urban Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and director of LSE Cities and the Urban Age Programme. He is a member of Council of the Royal College of Art in London. Burdett was Visiting Professor in Urban Planning and Design at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University in 2014 and Global Distinguished Professor at New York University from 2010 to 2014. He was also a member of the UK Government’s Independent Airports Commission. He has been involved in regeneration projects across Europe and was Chief Adviser on Architecture and Urbanism for the London 2012 Olympics (where he was involved in the selection of designers for many of the Olympic venues) and architectural adviser to the Mayor of London from 2001 to 2006. Burdett was also a member of the Urban Task Force which produced a major report for the UK government on the future of English cities. He is editor of The Endless City (2007), Living in the Endless City (2011) and Innovation in Europe’s Cities (2015). Burdett acts as an adviser to national, regional and local governments on urban issues, and has worked with private companies and architectural practices on the development and framing of urban projects. He was involved in the design competitions for Tate Modern, the Laban Centre, BBC projects in Broadcasting House, White City and Glasgow; the Royal Opera House Open-up project, NM Rothschild & Sons Headquarters in the City of London, the Golden Mede development at Waddesdon, the MAXXI Centre in Rome, the new Integrated transport system in Jeddah and the redevelopment of Penn Plaza in New York City.

Greg Clark is a global advisor for cities, major businesses, and investors. He works with leadership teams in global cities, global firms, global institutions, and at global gatherings. His current roles include:

* Chairman, OECD LEED Forum on Local Development and Investment Strategies, OECD, Paris.

* Global Fellow, Metropolitan Programme and Global Cities Initiative, The Brookings Institution, Washington DC.

* Senior Fellow, Urban Land Institute, Europe, London, UK.

* Chairman, JLL Cities Research Centre.

* Fellow, Future Cities Catapult.

* Chairman, London Stansted Cambridge Corridor Consortium.

* Board Member, London Enterprise Partnership (LEP), and London Economic Strategy Group (EDP).

* Board Member of: Crossrail 2 Growth Commission, West Anglia Task Force.

* Member, Lead Expert Board, UK Government Future of Cities Foresight Project.

Trained as an Economist, Social and Political Scientist, City & Regional Planner, he is a Harkness Fellow and author of ten books and numerous reports and papers on cities and business development issues.

From 2008 to 2016 he was chairman of the International Advisory Board of the New York Regional Plan, Oslo Regional Strategy, Salvador, Vienna, and Sao Paulo Strategic Plans and he was International Advisor on the Metropolitan Strategic Plans of Rio da Janeiro, Barcelona, Gauteng/Johannesburg, Western Cape, Toronto, Glasgow, Mumbai, Turin and Auckland. He has advised on metropolitan governance reform in London, Toronto, Barcelona, Auckland, Sao Paulo, Milan, and Oslo. He has led 20 Reviews of city and regional development for the OECD. He has advised on national policies for cities and regions in UK, Ireland, Canada, China, India, Colombia, Sri Lanka, South Africa¸ New Zealand, Italy, Slovakia, and Latvia.

He regularly chairs summits and congresses on development issues and acts as a moderator for leadership forums and boards. He is currently moderator of the World Mayors Forum, The Moscow Urban Forum, The Asia Pacific Cities Summit. He has led more than 100 summits and events for JP Morgan, Grosvenor, ICSC, INREV, ANREV, IEDC, ULI, OECD, World Bank, UN, The FT, The EIB, MIPIM, LSE, Brookings Institution, and The EU Council.

 

Isabel Dedring spent five years at Transport for London as Director, Policy Unit and before that as Chief of Staff to the Transport Commissioner. Isabel has also worked for Mckinsey and Ernst and Young. She has degrees in law from Harvard and is a qualified lawyer in the US. She is fluent in German, Russian and French.

Dame Tessa Jowell is a former MP and UK Government Secretary of State. She was Minister for the Olympics from 2005-2010 and Secretary of state for Culture Media and Sport from 2001-2007. In 2014 she was appointed Professor of Practice working with LSE Cities and the Department of Government on a range of academic and outreach initiatives.  She stood down from UK Parliament in 2015, having served as an MP for the London constituency of Dulwich and West Norwood since 1992.

Henk Ovink was Senior Adviser for U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan on the Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force. Before joining the Task Force in early 2013, Ovink was Director General of Spatial Planning and Water Affairs and Director of National Spatial Planning for the Ministry of Infrastructure and the Environment in the Netherlands. He was co-curator of the 5th International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam Making City 2012 and curator for the ANCB Berlin programme Design and Politics, the next phase

Professor Sue Parnell is an urban geographer in the Department of Environmental and Geographical Sciences at the University of Cape Town (UCT) and is on the Executive of the African Centre for Cities at UCT. She has held previous academic positions at Wits University and the University of London (SOAS) and visiting research fellowships from the LSE, Oxford University, Durham University, the British Academy and was a Leverhulme Visiting Professor at University College London. She is the author of over 100 academic papers, 8 edited volumes and 2 co-authored books. She serves on the Editorial boards of many ISI ranked academic journals dealing with urban and development issues..

Enrique Peñalosa Londoño is a Colombian politician who was mayor of Bogotá from 1998 until 2001, and was re-elected in 2015 for the 2016–2019 term. He has also worked as a journalist and consultant on urban and transportation policy.

Philipp Rode is Executive Director of LSE Cities and Senior Research Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He co-convenes the LSE Sociology Course on ‘City Making: The Politics of Urban Form’. As researcher and consultant he has been directing interdisciplinary projects comprising urban governance, transport, city planning and urban design since 2003. The focus of his current work is on green economy strategies in cities which includes co-directing the cities workstream of the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate. He has previously led the coordination of the chapters on Green Cities and Green Buildings for the United Nations Environment Programme’s Green Economy Report. Rode is Executive Director of the Urban Age Programme and since 2005 organised Urban Age conferences in over a dozen world cities bringing together political leaders, city mayors, urban practitioners, private sector representatives and academic experts. He manages the Urban Age research efforts and recently co-authored ‘Cities and Energy: Urban morphology and heat energy demand’ (2014), ‘Going Green: How cities are leading the green economy’ (2013), ‘Transforming Urban Economies’ (2012) and ‘The Global MetroMonitor’ (2010). He has previously worked on several multidisciplinary research and consultancy projects in New York and Berlin and was awarded the Schinkel Urban Design Prize 2000

Saskia Sassen is the Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology, and Chairs The Committee on Global Thought, Columbia University (www.saskiasassen.com). She is a student of cities, immigration, and states in the world economy, with inequality, gendering and digitization three key variables running though her work. Born in the Netherlands, she grew up in Argentina and Italy, studied in France, was raised in five languages, and began her professional life in the United States. She is the author of eight books and the editor or co-editor of three books. Together, her authored books are translated in over twenty languages. She has received many awards and honors, among them multiple doctor honoris causa, the 2013 Principe de Asturias Prize in the Social Sciences, election to the Royal Academy of the Sciences of the Netherlands, and made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres by the French government.

David Satterthwaite is a senior fellow at IIED and visiting professor at the Development Planning Unit, University College London. Two recent books co-authored with Diana Mitlin were Urban Poverty in the Global South; Scale and Nature (2012) and Reducing Urban Poverty in the Global South (2013). Both were published by Routledge.

He was a co-ordinating lead author of the chapter on urban adaptation in the Fifth Assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and he is currently working with other IPCC authors on a book on how cities can combine development and climate change adaptation and mitigation.

Professor Lord Nicholas Stern is the IG Patel Professor of Economics and Government, Chairman of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment and Head of the India Observatory at the London School of Economics. He is President of the British Academy (from July 2013), and was elected Fellow of the Royal Society (June 2014).

Professor Stern has held academic appointments in the UK at Oxford, Warwick and the LSE and abroad including at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Ecole Polytechnique and the Collège de France in Paris, the Indian Statistical Institute in Bangalore and Delhi, and the People’s University of China in Beijing.

He was Chief Economist of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, 1994-1999, and Chief Economist and Senior Vice President at the World Bank, 2000-2003.

He was Second Permanent Secretary to Her Majesty’s Treasury from 2003-2005; Director of Policy and Research for the Prime Minister’s Commission for Africa from 2004-2005; Head of the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, published in 2006; and Head of the Government Economic Service from 2003-2007.

He was knighted for services to economics in 2004 and made a cross-bench life peer as Baron Stern of Brentford in 2007. He has published more than 15 books and 100 articles and his most recent book is “Why are We Waiting? The Logic, Urgency and Promise of Tackling Climate Change”.

Tony Travers is Director of LSE London, a research centre at the London School of Economics. He is also a Visiting Professor in the LSE’s Government Department. His key research interests include local and regional government and public service reform.

He is currently an advisor to the House of Commons Children, Schools and Families Select Committee and the Communities and Local Government Select Committee. He has published a number of books on cities and government, including Failure in British Government, The Politics of the Poll Tax (with David Butler and Andrew Adonis), Paying for Health, Education and Housing: How does the Centre Pull the Purse Strings (with Howard Glennerster and John Hills) and The Politics of London: Governing the Ungovernable City.

Ireena Vittal is an independent director on the boards of some of India’s best-known companies. She was previously a partner at McKinsey & Co., where she worked for over 15 years, and co-authored the McKinsey Global Institute’s report ‘‘India’s Urban Awakening: Building Inclusive Cities, Sustaining Economic Growth.” She is now working on urban issues in India.

Mark Watts serves as the Executive Director for C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group. Prior to joining C40, Mark was the Director of Arup’s energy consulting team based in London. Focused on cities and sustainability, he lead Arup’s partnership with the C40 group of cities committed to tackling climate change. Prior to joining Arup as a Director in 2008, he was the climate change and sustainable transport adviser to the Mayor of London, in which role the London Evening Standard described him as “the intellectual force behind Ken Livingstone’s drive to make London a leading light of the battle against global warming.” He led the development of London’s ground-breaking Climate Change Action Plan and the associated programme of projects to reduce London’s carbon emissions by 60% by 2025. Mark is a member of the Yale Climate Dialogue and is a member of the Advisory Group at WRI’s Ross Center for Sustainable Cities