Author: Anne de Man

Esther Agricola is the Director of the Department of Planning and Sustainability for the city of Amsterdam. She’s the former director of the Department of Monuments and Archeology and for six years led the KEI knowledge centre, a national organisation focusing on redevelopment areas.

She is a member of several committees and boards improving spatial quality and design.

She’s a speaker at the conference Up Close & Liveable on Friday, June 22

Manfred Kühne is Head of the department Urban Planning and Projects for the Senate’s Administration of Urban Development in Berlin. He’s an expert on spatial planning.

He’s a member of the Association of urban, regional and national planning (SRL), a network of experts on spatial planning, and also of the German Academy of urban and national planning (DASL).

Before, he was responsible for historic preservation in Berlin and Head Urban Planning for the city of Stralsund. He studied architecture in Berlin.

He’s a speaker at the conference Up Close & Liveable on Friday, June 22. 

Gwyn Richards is an Assistant Director in the Department of the Built Environment in the City of London. As the City’s Head of Design, he negotiates the height, bulk, massing and urban design of new developments in the City.

He also leads the award-winning Future City Modelling initiative involving the 3-Dimensional modelling of the City to ascertain future development capacity while respecting all aspects of the city. Before, he was a Senior planner at Westminster City Council and prior to this, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. Richards represents the City of London in national and international conferences.

He is a speaker at the conference Up Close & Liveable on Friday, June 22. 

Professor Emeritus, Meiji University
Executive Director, The Mori Memorial Foundation

He majors in urban policy, urban and regional planning and emergency management and has authored numerous books on issues related to Tokyo and metropolitan regions. He has also served numerous public and private organizations including the Japanese government, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, Japan Telework Society, and Japan Association of Emergency Qualified Specialists. He graduated from Waseda University with a Bachelor of Architecture and later earned a Master of Urban Planning degree at Waseda University. He continued his studies under a Canadian government scholarship at the University of Waterloo where he was granted a Ph.D. from in Urban and Regional Planning. He is a member of the steering committee and a chairman of the working committee for the Global Power City Index (GPCI). The GPCI, carried out by the Mori Memorial Foundation, is the sole global city ranking issued in Japan.

He is a speaker at the conference Up Close & Liveable on Friday, June 22.

Catherine Veyrat- Durebex is a sociologist, involved in supporting and executing democratising participation projects in the city of Nantes.

After finishing her social studies, she worked for several design studios in France, such as the Laboratory for social sciences (LARES) and the Center for urban and rural studies and research ( CERUR). In 2007, she was part of a major mission in Nantes, evaluating the government policies, with a special focus on culture.

She is a speaker is a speaker at Co-Creating the City on Thursday, June 20.

Nicole Maarsen is director Real Estate Investments at Syntrus Achmea Real Estate & Finance, supporting clients to fulfill their ambitions on sustainability, social entrepreneurship, and responsible urbanisation.

Maarsen is responsible for the business units Housing, Shops, Offices, International Real Estate and Development. She used to work for ING, Nationale Nederlanden, and Maarsen Group. She’s also an independent adviser, working for HAL Investments and Round Hill Capital.

She’s a board member of the Center for Visual Arts in Rotterdam and member of the advisory council for the Forum Urban Renewal. 

Maarsen is a speaker at Setting the Urban Agenda of Tomorrow on Wednesday, June 20.

Arna Mackic is an architect and founder of Studio L A and is head of Architectural Design at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy. She specialises in reconstructional architecture. Mackic was awarded the ‘Maaskantprijs’ for Young Architects 2017. According to the jury, Arna is ‘a unifying voice, who heals the wounds of the past, without glossing over the scars’.

The architect works for RAAAF (Rietveld Architecture-Art-Affordances), an Amsterdam-based design studio working at the intersection of architecture, arts, and philosophy. In 2013, she was awarded a talent development scholarship from the Promotion Fund Creative Industry. She used it to do research on the role of architecture during the turning points in the history of the Balkan, during and after World War II. It resulted in the publication ‘Mortal Cities & Forgotten Monuments’.

She researches current societal issues – the quest for identity, contradictions between populations, mechanisms of in- and exclusion and refugees – and reflects on it by word, writings, and design.

She is a speaker at Setting the Urban Agenda of Tomorrow on Wednesday, June 20.

Marleen Stikker is co-founder and director of the Waag Society in Amsterdam, a cultural research and innovation center. It develops new media applications for societal domains like education, health, and arts. It launched startups like Fairphone. Stikker is actively involved in the Open Design and Creative Commons movement.

Stikker is setting the pace for experimental internet and new media. She co-founded the Digital City in 1993 and the Society for Old and New Media in 1994, later to become Waag Society. She created the first free access portal and virtual community on the internet.

She was part of the Amsterdam Telematics Council and a board member of the Virtual Platform, an expertise center for e-culture. She organises, among many other things, PICNIC, the Amsterdam Cross Media week.

Stikker is an advisor of the Policy Stategy Group of the European Commission.

She is a speaker at Setting the Urban Agenda of Tomorrow on Wednesday, June 20.

Francesca Bria is a Nesta Senior Adviser and Senior Project Lead in the Nesta Innovation Lab. She is the EU Coordinator of the D-CENT project on open democracy and social digital currencies and she is the Principal Investigator of the DSI project on digital social innovation in Europe.

Bria is a member of the Internet of Things Council and she advises the European Commission on Future Internet and Smart Cities policy. She is also a member of the EC Expert Group on Open Innovation (OISPG) and a member of the European Research Cluster on the Internet of Things ( IERC). She is also active in various innovation movements advocating for open access, open technologies, and digital rights, and she has been advising a variety of organisations and public institutions on innovation policy, open technology, the Internet of Things and smart cities.

The Nesta Innovation Lab was launched in 2009 and focuses on supporting innovation in education, local and central government, the arts, the collaborative economy and civil society.

She is a speaker at Setting the Urban Agenda of Tomorrow on Wednesday, June 20.