Carol

Carol Coletta is president and CEO of the Memphis River Parks Partnership. She is leading the relaunch of a nonprofit to develop, manage and program six miles of riverfront and five park districts along the Mississippi River.

She leads a $50+ million collaboration of national and local foundations, local nonprofits and governments to Reimagine the Civic Commons in five cities. It is the first comprehensive demonstration of how a connected set of civic assets — a civic commons — can yield increased and more widely share prosperity for cities and neighborhoods.

She was a senior fellow for The Kresge Foundation; vice president of Community and National Initiatives for the Knight Foundation; served as executive director of the Mayors’ Institute on City Design; and, was the host and producer of the nationally syndicated weekly public radio show Smart City.

Mary

Mary Rowe is President and CEO of the Canadian Urban Institute. She is a leading urban advocate and civil society leader who has worked in cities across Canada and the United States.

Mary served as Executive Vice President of the Municipal Art Society of New York (MASNYC), one of America’s oldest civic advocacy organizations focused on the built environment. She was a fellow with the US-based blue moon fund and worked in New Orleans with national philanthropy, governments and local communities to support rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina. Mary was President of the Canadian platform Ideas That Matter, a convening and publishing program based on the work of renowned urbanist Jane Jacobs.

Kimberly

Kimberly Driggins is the executive director of the Washington Housing Conservancy. Previously, she was the Director of Strategic Planning for the City of Detroit Government's Planning and Development Department, Kimberly was responsible for citywide planning initiatives regarding vacant land strategy, cultural and heritage planning, neighborhood retail and equitable development.

Driggins also served as Associate Director of Citywide Planning for the District of Columbia Government.

Kim currently serves as board member for Project for Public Spaces and board chairperson for Gehl Institute. She has a BA degree from Hampton University, an MPP from the University Of Chicago Harris School Of Public Policy and was a Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Katja

Katja Schectner coined the term “agile mobility” and is an expert in digitization and the future of urban mobility. She is an urban scientist who holds a dual appointment between OECD and MIT to develop new technologies and shape innovative policies to keep cities on the move. Previously she worked at the Asian Development Bank implementing transport technology projects across Asia; formulated smart public space strategies for the Inter-American Development Bank in Costa Rica and Argentina; advised the EU Commission on Smart City programs and headed the applied research lab for Dynamic Transportation Systems at the Austrian Institute of Technology.

Red

Renato Redentor Constatino has worked for close to three decades with international climate, development and environment campaigning organizations. He is currently the deputy chair of the Expert Advisors Group of the 48-government membership Climate Vulnerable Forum (CVF), which led the global campaign to enshrine the 1.5ºC temperature threshold in the Paris Agreement.
Constantino heads the Institute for Climate and Sustainable Cities, which launched the first electric public jeepneys in the Philippines in 2007 and which is among the groups leading the campaign for inclusive mobility.

Red is the author of The Poverty of Memory: Essays on History and Empire and was part of the anthologies Letters to the Earth with Yoko Ono, Mary Oliver, Emma Thompson and Mark Rylance, As head of ICSC, he published and contributed to what might be the world’s first literary anthology on climate change, Agam: Filipino Narratives on Uncertainty and Climate Change, which was awarded three national book awards.

Anthony

Dr. Anthony Townsend works at the intersection of urbanization and digital technology. He is Urbanist in Residence at Cornell Tech’s Jacobs Institute, where his research focuses on scenarios and ethical frameworks for urban tech innovation.

Anthony is the author of two books, Ghost Road: Beyond the Driverless Car (2020) and Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers and the Quest for A New Utopia (2013), both published by W.W. Norton & Co.

His consultancy, Star City Group, works around the world with industry, government and philanthropy on urban tech foresight, policy, and planning studies.

Apiwat

Dr. Apiwat Ratanawaraha is an associate professor at the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. His teaching and research cover land policy and management, infrastructure finance, technology and innovation policy, and strategic foresight. His recent and ongoing research focuses on urban issues in Thailand, including the futures of Thai urban life from womb to tomb, foreign ownership of land, informal mobility, parking policy, and urban citizen science. His publications include The Land Economy of Thailand (2015); "How Operators' Legal Status Affects Safety of Intercity Buses in Thailand" (with Saksith Chalermpong, Transportation Research Record 2672 [2018]); and a chapter on Bangkok in Parking: An International Perspective (with Saksith Chalermpong).

Ratanawaraha holds a B.Eng. in urban engineering from the University of Tokyo, an M.Phil. in land economy from the University of Cambridge, and an M.C.P. and a Ph.D. in economic development and technology policy from MIT. He was a visiting assistant professor at the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning and a visiting scholar at the Harvard-Yenching Institute.

Ben C.

Ruben Canlas Jr is an Agile coach and an advocate of learner-centered education. He has coached software teams and organizations to learn and become Agile thinkers and practitioners. In his spare time he teaches IT, organizational change, and leadership courses for a top business school in the Philippines and is a co-organizer of GDG Cloud Manila. In a former life, he ran the MBA program for a medical school and produced investigative television shows in the Philippines. 

Ben C. holds a Master of Science in Information Technology from Carnegie Mellon University Australia, an MBA from the Ateneo Graduate School of Business, and a Bachelor of Arts in Mass Communication at the University of the Philippines.