Rogier van den Berg is the Director of Urban Development for WRI Ross Center for Sustainable Cities. As part of WRI’s program focused on more accessible, equitable, healthy and resilient cities, van den Berg leads global programming on strategic urban planning, land use, urban resilience, equitable development, housing, data and finance. As a core member of the Executive Team, he helps to guide the overall strategy of the Cities program.

Van den Berg is an urban planning and urban development specialist, architect, former entrepreneur and academic who most recently led UN-Habitat’s Urban Lab, which he set up in 2014. It was created to respond to urban planning demand in cities, and rapidly expanded its scope to become a multidisciplinary urban project and integrated planning facility working in 80 cities globally. Van den Berg led global teams working at the intersection of infrastructure, urban planning, urban resilience, climate change adaptation, technology, recovery and reconstruction, and public space. He has established and implemented development projects and programs together with cities and partners in Europe, Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, the Middle East and Asia.

Earlier, he was a founding partner of the architecture and planning firm Zandbelt&vandenBerg, where he led a broad portfolio of urban planning and strategy, and he also served as head of the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture’s Master of Urbanism program.

Van den Berg holds an Executive Master’s Degree in International Negotiation and Policymaking from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies and a Master of Science in Architecture from Delft University of Technology.

Van den Berg lives in Rotterdam with his wife, two sons and daughter.

He is currently the Commissioner of Planning & Development, City of Brampton. He has previously worked at City of Barrie as the General Manager of Infrastructure, Development & Culture.

For his contributions to architecture as an art, Nader Tehrani is the recipient of the 2020 Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize from The American Academy of Arts and Letters, to which he was also elected as a Member in 2021, the highest form of recognition of artistic merit in The United States.

Nader Tehrani is Founding Principal of NADAAA, a practice dedicated to the advancement of design innovation, interdisciplinary collaboration, and an intensive dialogue with the construction industry. He is also Dean of The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at The Cooper Union. 

Tehrani’s work has been recognized with notable awards, including the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award in Architecture, the United States Artists Fellowship in Architecture and Design, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Architecture. He has also received the Harleston Parker Award and the Hobson Award. Throughout his career, Tehrani has received eighteen Progressive Architecture Awards as well as numerous national and international design awards. He served as the Frank O. Gehry International Visiting Chair in Architectural Design at the University of Toronto and the inaugural Paul Helmle Fellow at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. He has also recently served as the William A. Bernoudy Architect in Residence at the American Academy in Rome. His office, NADAAA, for the past seven years in a row, has ranked in the Top eleven design firms in Architect Magazine’s Top 50 Firms in the United States, ranking as First three years in a row.

Tehrani received a B.Arch from The Rhode Island School of Design in 1986. He continued his studies at The Architectural Association, where he attended the Post-Graduate program in History and Theory. Upon his return to The United States, Tehrani received his M.A.U.D from The Harvard Graduate School of Design in 1991.

Kyra heads the Cities, States & Regions team, having joined CDP in 2010. Prior to her role at CDP, Kyra worked in various research positions at NBC Universal, eMarketer and the City of New York. Kyra holds an MA in Public Administration from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University and a BA in Environmental Earth Science from the Johns Hopkins University.

Abdinassir Sagar is an Associate Program Management Officer at the United Nations Human Settlements Programme’s new innovation section established to strengthen innovative thinking, practices and solutions for sustainable urban development.

At UN headquarters, Abdinassir supported the UN Secretariat's strategic workforce planning efforts aimed at maintaining a stronger, more effective, competent, diverse and agile workforce. Abdinassir also supported the preparation of UN Secretary General reports to UN General Assembly and it’s committee on administration matters. In addition, at the UN, he undertook monitoring and reporting of strategic human resource (HR) indicators including the maintenance of an enterprise HR Scorecard.

Prior to joining the UN, Abdinassir has worked for professional services firms in Canada (two of the Big Four firms) as a Management Consultant where he advised clients in the private and public sector on technology-related transformation projects. Abdinassir has also worked for multiple non-governmental organizations (NGOs) where he undertook camp management, needs assessment and community mobilization activities.

Abdinassir holds MBA from the University of Alberta School of Business and is a certified Project Manager (PRINCE2 Practitioner), Enterprise Architect (TOGAF), Strategic Workforce Planner (HCI SWP) and IT Service Manager (ITIL and ServiceNow Administrator). He has also completed Sustainability Management Course at Columbia University as a graduate visiting student. He has skills and extensive experience in project management, data analysis and strategy development including gathering requirements, defining current and future states, and developing recommendations and implementation plans.

For over four decades he has played a pivotal role on public and private assignments in urban settings throughout North America and Europe, focusing on the rejuvenation of downtowns, waterfronts, neighborhoods and on campus master planning, regional growth management, and new community planning. His work sits at the intersection of urban design, architecture, landscape, mobility, social and economic development. Cities as diverse as Toronto, Hartford, Amsterdam, New York, Boston, Montréal, Ottawa, Edmonton, Calgary, St. Louis, Washington DC, Paris, Detroit, Saint Paul and San Juan Puerto Rico have benefited from his advocacy and passion for restoring the vitality, relevance and sustainability of the public realm in urban life. In each city, with each project, his strategic, consensus-building approach has led to coordinated planning and a renewed focus on urban design. He is the recipient of the 2010 American Institute of Architects Thomas Jefferson Award for Public Design Excellence and the 2014 Sustainable Buildings Canada Lifetime Achievement Award. He was selected as a Member of the Order of Canada in 2020 and was awarded a Doctor of Laws, honoris causa from the University of Toronto.

Barend Wind (1989) is lecturer in socio-spatial planning at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. In his research, he focuses on the institutional changes and housing policy shifts that have resulted in the current European housing crisis. As a 'pracademic', partly working at a non-profit housing association in Amsterdam, he aims to develop policy models that promote environmental sustainability and affordable housing by taking spatial justice as guiding principle while planning against market forces rather than facilitating them. 

Trond Vedeld has a PhD and currently works at Norwegians Institute for Urban and Regional Research (NIBR), Oslo Metropolitan University. Trond does research in Political Economy, Public Administration and Urban Politics, Climate Governance, Climate services. His most recent publication is: Reaching out? Governing weather and climate services (WCS) for farmers, Environmental Science and Policy 104, p 208-216 (Vedeld, Hofstad, Mathur, Büker and Stordal 2020).

Nicholas Phelps is Professor and Chair of Urban Planning in the Melbourne School of Design, Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning and is also Visiting Professor at the School of Earth Sciences, Zhejiang University, China. He was previously Professor of Urban and Regional Development in the Bartlett School of Planning and Pro Vice Provost Regional (Southeast Asia) at University College London. He currently sits on the editorial boards of Economic Geography and Journal of Economy Geography.

His research and teaching interests cover the planning and politics of suburbanization, the economics of urban agglomeration, international planning, entrepreneurship, informality and economic development, and the economic geography of multinational enterprises and foreign direct investment, with research funded by the British Academy, the UK Economic and Social Research Council, National Geographic, The Leverhulme Trust, the Royal Town Planning Institute and Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors among others. He is author of over 80 international peer reviewed journal articles, five books including Interplaces (OUP), An Anatomy of Sprawl (Routledge), Sequel to Suburbia (MIT Press) and Post-Suburban Europe (Palgrave-MacMillan). He is also editor of five books including The Planning Imagination (Routledge), International Perspectives on Suburbanization (Palgrave MacMillan) and Old Europe, New Suburbanization (University of Toronto Press).

Prof. Peña leads the Urban Research and Action Group at the Faculty of Architecture at Havana´s Technological University-CUJAE where he researches and teaches urban topics. Research privileges transdisciplinar approaches. Current projects are www.urban-know.com (DPU,UCL), @GREAT (Uni.Lancaster-Cali), Productive Urban Landscapes, MAS-Havana (UCL-CUJAE), GCSMUS (TU-Berlin-CUJAE) among others. He also leads the Master on Planning and is an expert and advisor for the local planning authority.

Extraordinary Professor, School of Public Leadership

 Stellenbosch University, South Africa

Founding Board Member, World Smart Cities 

  Economic Development Commission, 

  World Business Angels Investment Forum, USA

Distinguished Professor, Urban Youth Academy, Seoul

Series Editor, SCOPUS-indexed Springer Nature book series, 

   Advances in 21st Century Human Settlements, Singapore

Dr. Jonathan Reichental is the founder of Human Future, a global business and technology advisory, investment, and education firm. Previous roles have included senior software engineering manager, director of technology innovation, and he has served as chief information officer at both O’Reilly Media and the City of Palo Alto, California.

In 2013 he was recognized as one of the 25 doers, dreamers, and drivers in government in America. In 2016, he was named a top influential CIO in the United States and in 2017, he was named one of the top 100 CIOs in the world. He has also won a best CIO in Silicon Valley award and a national IT leadership prize.

Reichental is a recognized global thought leader on a number of emerging trends including urban innovation, smart cities, sustainability, blockchain technology, data governance, the fourth industrial revolution, and digital transformation.

He holds several degrees including a Ph.D. in Information Systems. He is an adjunct professor in the School of Management at the University of San Francisco and instructs at several other universities. Reichental regularly creates online video courses for LinkedIn Learning.

He is a popular global keynote speaker and writer, including authoring a bestseller on the future of cities. His latest book, Exploring Smart Cities Activity Book for Kids, will be released in Summer 2021.

Editor, Environment & Urbanization.

Research and documentation on the current and potential role of urban poor federations to address their needs and develop partnerships with government agencies

Research on why the scale and depth of urban poverty is under-estimated and mis-represented by most governments and international agencies.

Research on urban risk in cities in Africa with particular attention to those most at risk – undertaken with a consortium of several African and British research institutions.

Previously director of IIED's Human Settlements research group. He was awarded the Volvo Environment Prize in 2004 and was part of the IPCC team honoured with the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.

Dr Joe Flood is a policy analyst, an expert on housing and urban economics, and a global authority on housing and urban indicators. He has worked for CSIRO, the United Nations, and Community Housing Limited, and was one of the founders of the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute. In 2019 he has re-established Shelter Victoria, a not-for-profit that advocates for affordable housing. As well, he is a phylogenealogist, managing a large group of people with Cornish ancestors.

Erez Ella was born in Jerusalem in 1971 and studied Architecture at the Tel Aviv University and the TU Delft in the Netherlands.

Erez founded HQ architects in Tel Aviv in 2008 after spending several years as an Associate at OMA (1999 and 2005) and as Principal at REX ( 2006 to 2008). There, he led the TVCC project in Beijing, directed the design of the second scheme of the Whitney Museum in New York and oversaw, together with his former partner, the design of the Wyly Theatre in Dallas.

From Tel Aviv, Erez leads HQ Architects’ design work of more than 20 different projectsin Israel and around the globe, various in scale and program. HQ Architects exhibit an expanding portfolio of work among various sectors, including public spaces and infrastructure, a wide range of cultural and educational projects as well as offices, hotels and retail projects.

Recently, the practice’s ability to rethink and challenge conventions led it to be part of US-Israeli team for NASA challenge “Habitat on Mars” - a challenge to establish a 3D printed habitat for future astronauts on Mars.

Erez’s involvement extends far beyond the world of architectural design. He co-curated the Israeli Pavilion at the 2012 Venice Biennial of Architecture, and is the co-editor in chief of the architectural book titled “Aircraft Carrier - American Ideas and Israeli Architectures after 1973” (Hajte Cantz, 2012).

In 2011, Erez established and currently leads the ‘Mechanism of Design and Urbanism’ research unit at the Bezalel School of Architecture. Erez lectures extensively in Israel and abroad.

Erez Ella was named “The Most Promising Architects Under the Age of 40” by the Wallpaper Magazine, and in “The Most Promising Professionals Under the Age of 40” in Israel by The Marker Magazine.

He is also a member of the ‘Jerusalem Season of Culture’ board of directors.