Manushi Ashok Jain

Manushi Ashok is the Co-founder and Director of Sponge Collaborative, an interdisciplinary strategic planning and design firm that focuses on nature-based solutions, integrated blue-green infrastructure, sustainable mobility, inclusive housing, and vibrant public spaces to help build resilient cities. She is an Architect and Urban Designer who has recently been featured on Forbes magazine’s ‘30 under 30’ young leaders for 2022.

Inclusive European Cities - Designing for living systems

Mateusz Mastalski from Danish architectural firm Henning Larsen gave a presentation on inclusive European cities and designing for living systems. Through a design study in the city of Copenhagen, he highlighted that the old way of developing cities is long gone, and that there is a need to change people's mindsets completely. He also underscored the importance of not only building communities, but also being part of the larger ecosystem where people live and work together with nature.

Copenhagen – a smart livable and resilient city

Ms. Lykke Leonardsen, City of Copenhagen's Head of Program for Resilient and Sustainable Cities, spoke about the city's work on adaptation and resilience and its journey to becoming a smart and resilient city. She shared Copenhagen's vision of working with all city stakeholders to co-create the most livable city in the world and how the city will deliver this to future generations in terms of climate action, carbon emissions reduction, and resiliency. She further underscored the value of understanding what matters to their city stakeholders and how this influences their planning.​

Herbert Dreiseitl

Herbert Dreiseitl is Harvard GSD Loeb Fellow, and Fellow of the Center of Liveable Cities in Singapore and a renowned Landscape Architect, Urban Designer, Water Artist, Interdisciplinary Planner, and currently Visiting Professor at the National University of Singapore (NUS). He lectures worldwide and has authored many publications including three editions of Recent Waterscapes, Planning, Building and Designing with Water. 

Theresa Fink

Theresa Fink is a Researcher in Urban Design Computation in the Competence Unit Digital Resilient Cities at the AIT Austrian Institute of Technology in Vienna. Her expertise lies in the field of digital, parametric urban master planning using computational methods and urban analyses. She graduated in Architecture at the Graz University of Technology in Austria. During her studies she gained experience in parametric design in international architectural offices like Herzog & de Meuron and Baumschlager Eberle in Liechtenstein and Switzerland.

Saibal Das Chowdhury

Saibal Das Chowdhury is an urban technologist and CEO and Co-Founder of Urbanetic –   a ‘City-as-a-Service’ software platform for digitization of buildings and infrastructure and their development financing, securitization and exchange.  A former VP of Hewlett-Packard for start-ups investments and VP of AT&T Solutions Asia-Pacific, Saibal has been among the pioneers in the areas of industrial robotics and Product Life-Cycle management (PLM) technologies. 

Ricardo Cabrera-Nyst

Ricardo Cabrera-Nyst is an Architect, Building Engineer and Urban Design specialist at the Esri R&D Center in Zürich.  He is currently involved in the development of Esri software with focus on practical applications related to Architecture, Urban Design and Planning.

His professional interests are motivated by the elaboration of interconnected specialized tools, that might work together, integrated in a holistic vision of the urban development process within a GIS framework.