Thomas Heatherwick

Founder, Heatherwick Studio

Thomas Heatherwick is a British designer whose prolific and varied work over two decades is characterized by its ingenuity, inventiveness and originality. Defying the conventional classification of design disciplines, Thomas founded Heatherwick Studio in 1994 to bring the practices of design, architecture and urban planning together in a single workspace. Based in London, Heatherwick Studio focuses on designing for the human experience and is currently working on approximately 30 projects in ten countries, including new headquarters for Google in Silicon Valley and London (in collaboration with BIG); Toranomon-Azabudai — a six-hectare mixed-use development in the center of Tokyo; and Airo – an electric car that cleans the air as it drives. The studio has recently completed Little Island, a park and performance space on the Hudson River in New York; the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town; and Coal Drops Yard, a major new retail district in King’s Cross, London. His forthcoming book, Humanise, will be published by Penguin.

Helle Søholt

Founding Partner & CEO, Gehl

Helle is Founding Partner and CEO of Gehl. She started the company with Professor Jan Gehl in 2000. Through her leadership, strategic and organizational talent, the office has developed a knowledge base and experience portfolio that is respected internationally in the field of urban design and urban development. Over the years of its existence, Gehl has been awarded multiple prizes and recognitions for their contribution to making cities more livable and sustainable around the world.

Michael Turner

President, Oxford Properties

Michael Turner is President of Oxford Properties, a leading global real estate investor, asset manager and business builder and Global Head of Real Estate for the OMERS pension plan. Michael is Chair of Oxford’s Leadership team and Investment Committee and is responsible for the overall guidance and strategic direction of the global team and $80 billion*, ~164 million* square foot business.

Lynn M. Ross

Founder & Principal , Spirit for Change Consulting

Lynn M. Ross is a nationally recognized urbanist, strategist, and founder of Spirit for Change Consulting, LLC where she works with multi-sector teams on a mission to create the equitable policies and practices that sustain just places. Lynn believes that everyone deserves a place to thrive and that the best approaches to just places are co-created, rooted in lived experience, equitable by design, and intentionally inclusive.

Brooks Rainwater

Director, National League of Cities

Brooks Rainwater is the senior executive and director of the National League of Cities’ (NLC) Center for City Solutions. Rainwater drives the organization’s research agenda, community engagement efforts, and leadership education programming to help city leaders create strong local economies, safe and vibrant neighborhoods, world-class infrastructure, and a sustainable environment. Rainwater’s expertise is a draw for media outlets, including the TODAY Show, Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, CNN, NPR, and the New York Times. He also frequently contributes to publications such as Fast Company, Forbes, CityLab, Business Insider, TechCrunch, and Fortune.

Katrina Johnston-Zimmerman

Urban Anthropologist, Think.urban

Katrina is a lecturer, researcher, and advocate for humanist cities. She is a consultant through her firm THINK.urban and adjunct professor for the Masters of Urban Strategy at Drexel University, as well as guest lecturer for the Masters in Urbanism program at the Royal Institute for Technology in Stockholm, Sweden (KTH). As an applied urban anthropologist, her work focuses on human behavior in public space and the relationship between behavior and design. Through the use of “spatial ethnographies”, she utilizes principles of user experience research and design to assess the effectiveness of urban form on the human condition, physically and psychologically. Lectures include instruction on qualitative research methods, observation techniques, survey research, and ancient urban history with an emphasis on public space.

William Ruh

CEO, Lendlease Digital

Mr. William Ruh is the Chief Executive Officer for Lendlease Digital. In this role, he is building a new business to help transform the real estate industry. LendLease Digital is developing the world’s first set of Autonomous Building products to automate design, supply chain, construction and operations.

He serves on the Board of Directors of Magna International and CADMakers. He is the Vice Chair of the Board at the American Chamber of Commerce of Australia, member of the board of the Building 4.0 CRC research program in Australia, and is a founder and Chair of the Digital Twin Consortium.

Manish Vora

CEO, Museum of Ice Cream

Manish Vora is Co-Ceo and Founder of Museum of Ice Cream. MOIC believes in creating beautiful and shareable environments that foster IRL interaction and URL connections, providing fun, multi-sensorial expressions of ice cream that cater to the appetites of our generation. MOIC has locations in New York, Austin, Singapore and Chicago.

Claire Johnston

Managing Director, Lendlease for Google Real Estate Development

Claire Johnston serves as Managing Director for Lendlease’s Google Real Estate Development venture, a 15 year, US $15bn (AUD $20bn) joint undertaking of master planning, entitlement and development of Google’s Bay Area landholdings in San Jose, Sunnyvale and Mountain View, California. Lendlease estimates it will develop up to 15 million square feet of residential, retail, hospitality and associated community uses within these four new neighborhoods.

Jason Long

Partner, OMA

Jason Long is a Partner at OMA who leads its New York office and diverse portfolio in the Americas. Since joining the firm in 2003, Jason has brought a research-driven, interdisciplinary approach to a wide range of OMA’s projects internationally. A number of projects under Jason’s direction take a creative approach to adaptive reuse and preservation, including POST Houston, the transformation of a former post office warehouse into a mixed-use hub; the conversion of a historic parking garage in New York City into a new synagogue; the renovation of the historic Fitzgerald Building at University of Toronto into the university’s administration center; the adaptive reuse of Jersey City’s historic Pathside Building into Centre Pompidou x Jersey City; and LANTERN, the reimagination of a former commercial bakery into a community arts hub in Detroit.

Alexa Arena

Senior Director of Real Estate Development, Google

As Senior Director of Real Estate Development, Alexa Arena oversees Google’s entire portfolio of ground-up, mixed-use developments in the San Francisco Bay Area. This includes Mountain View, Sunnyvale, and San Jose, where she leads the strategy and execution of district-scale developments that create inclusive, sustainable places where Google and local communities can thrive. Alexa ensures that each project addresses complex ecological, environmental, and social issues by integrating affordable housing, social infrastructure programs, sustainable designs, and placemaking activities. In addition, Alexa and her team work closely with local city governments, community members, and design and development partners to deliver districts that are truly user-centered, forward-thinking, and built with the future in mind.

Patrik Schumacher

Principal, Zaha Hadid Architects

Patrik Schumacher is principal of Zaha Hadid Architects. He studied philosophy, mathematics and architecture in Bonn, Stuttgart and London and received his PhD at the Institute for Cultural Science in Klagenfurt. In 1996 he founded the Design Research Laboratory at the AA in London where he continues to teach. Since 2007 he has been promoting Parametricism as an epochal style for the 21st Century. In 2010/12 he published “The Autopoiesis of Architecture” in two Volumes and recently guest-edited AD – Parametricism 2.0, emphasizing the societal relevance of Parametricism. His current research and design interest is focused on the metaverse and the integration of real and virtual communication spaces.