Can nature and technology—long viewed as opposing forces—work together to stabilize our climate, sustain our urban environments, and benefit our health? Dr. Nadina Galle is an ecological engineer, technologist, TEDx & keynote speaker, TV presenter, and podcaster—on a mission to find out. She coined her concept "Internet of Nature" (IoN) in her Ph.D. dissertation and now brings emerging technologies to market that are restorative of nature, rather than exploitative. Nadina is a former Fulbright Scholar at MIT Senseable City Lab, where she holds a research affiliation; a seasonal lecturer at the University of Amsterdam; and an advisor to start-ups and universities. Her work has been in documentaries by BBC Earth and arte.tv; on British, Irish, and Dutch radio shows; and in print including Newsweek, ELLE, and National Geographic. Forbes and Elsevier have selected her for their “30 under 30” lists.

Russell Galt is an ecologist and Head of IUCN’s Urban Alliance – a broad coalition of IUCN constituents working towards greener cities. He considers access to a clean, safe and wildlife-rich environment to be a human right that requires special attention in urban areas. From Brussels, Cape Town, Nairobi and Edinburgh, he has spent the past decade working internationally for IUCN, ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability, the South African National Biodiversity Institute and the United Nations Environment Programme. He holds an LLM in Natural Resources Law from the University of Dundee and a BSc (Hons) in Ecological Science from the University of Edinburgh.

Dean of the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, TU Delft

Maria Carmen Garcia Mateo is a Senior Sustainability Strategist Adviser R&I, Senior Architect and Planner. Currently, she is a partner and PI in the Horizon 2020, GOGREEN ROUTES project; Visionary and integrated solutions to improve well-being and health in cities and a member of the extended Core Team of the COST Action 17133. Implementing nature based solutions for creating a resourceful circular city. Research activities focus on topics related to Nature-Based Solutions, Environment, Ecosystem Services, Biodiversity, Climate action, Circular Economy and Energy Efficiency. Specifically, research interests rely on NBS for sustainable urbanisation and urban regeneration to enhance human well-being and health in cities and urban-rural interactions regarding holistic sustainable planning, design, policy governance. NBS novel approach methods for trans-disciplinary processes, multilevel co-creation, co-design and co-implementation in strategic governance policy domain to tackle societal challenges. Maria Carmen Garcia Mateo has been managing R&I project proposals for cities and regions in the H2020 European Framework Funding Program. At present, she is a member of the European Commission on Nature-Based Solutions Task Force 6 and Task Force 2 , with the aim to help mainstreaming nature-based solutions into the EU policy and strengthen the EU Green Deal and international policy agendas. She is an external reviewer of IPCC and IPBES. Recently, she has been invited by the European Commission to be an expert evaluator of Horizon Europe Missions.

Prof. Salvador Garcia-Ayllon works at the Department of Civil Engineering in the Technical University of Cartagena (Spain) and is currently a visiting professor at the university of California Berkeley. Salvador does research in Urban Planning and Environmental & Territorial Management. His current projects are related to GIS diagnosis of territorial management, environmental planning, real state & urban planning, spatial hazards risk assessment and infrastructure development.

Sarantis Georgiou is an architect/urbanist, with a MSc (Hons) in Urbanism from TUDelft and a MArch/DiplArchEng from UTH (registered as an architect in the Netherlands, the UK and Greece). His interests lie at the intersection of landscape and urbanism, through the requalification of non-anthropogenic systems as resource and design space for strategic and tactical spatial planning, design and engineering on landscape ecology and water-sensitivity. He emphasizes spatial frameworks, grounded on the interactions between landscape performativity, urban productive-consumptive programmes and infrastructural works. He has conducted research at the Transitional Territories MSc Graduation Studio/Delta Urbanism Research Group at TUDelft on productive nature as flood-related landscape infrastructure. He taught at the Department of Urbanism of the Faculty of Architecture and the Summer School: Planning and Design with Water at TUDelft, in the fields of urban/landscape typo-morphology, open space, complex systems theory, water-sensitive landscape design/engineering, and sustainable/resilient and adaptive spatial planning and governance. He acted as the Editor-in-Chief of “Atlantis | Magazine for Urbanism and Landscape Architecture”, where he developed the thematic agenda and topics for Volume 29. His work has been published in several outlets, exhibited/presented at the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam, the Barcelona Architecture Week, TUDelft, DArch/UTH, and featured in various platforms.

Jeremy Gibberd is an Architect with research interests in sustainable and inclusive built environments. He has worked on a wide range of built environment projects in Africa and has developed legislation, policy, tools and training for government, the private sector and community organisations. Dr Gibberd has authored tools such as the BEST and SBAT that provide innovative ways of measuring sustainability performance in neighbourhoods and buildings. More information on Jeremy Gibberd can be found at jeremygibberd.com

I am a PhD student in Environmental and Land Planning Engineering at Politecnico di Milano. My studies have focused mainly on Natural Resources Management, Statistical Models and Stochastic Processes, Land Use and GIS Systems, Ecosystems Conservation and Management, Environmental Impact Assessment.

Experienced sustainability professional working in the space of sustainable urbanization. Ms. Gil manages multiple projects and focus on partnerships with internal and external actors for the UN Environment Programme. Expert on circular economy, sustainable consumption and production, urban metabolism. At UNEP Cities Unit, Ms. Gil aims to find practical solutions that will make sustainability easier for cities in developing country contexts.

Ms. Ginestet has a master in International Management and in Development Economics. She joined UNEP Cities Unit as a consultant to support cities in their transition to circularity with a bottom-up and community-based focus.

Vanessa Gomes is an awarded Associate Professor at the University of Campinas, UNICAMP. Architecture and Urbanist and Doctor in Civil Engineering from the Universidade de São Paulo (2003), she joined the Editorial board member of PARC Journal (2020) to stimulate research and publications on sustainability research applied to the built environment. Sustainable design and construction champion, she has participated in several international cooperations and exchanges and pioneered studies on the environmental assessment of buildings and life cycle assessment of construction products, elements and whole buildings. More recently, she has been dedicated to specifics of whole building LCA (protocol, uncertainty, inventory collection), assessments at neighborhood and urban scale, and consequential and prospective LCA.

Srilalitha Gopalakrishnan is a landscape architect with over 15 years of professional experience and a diverse portfolio of projects across Singapore, Malaysia, China, Hong Kong and India. She has worked with Tierra Design in Singapore for over 11 years on projects ranging from residential, commercial, hospitality, institutional, recreational and master planning with many of her projects winning several accolades. Her strong belief in integrated landscape design as an effective solution for sustainable high-density urban environments motivated the move towards pursuing a PhD in Architecture and Sustainable Design at Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD). Under the guidance and supervision of Professor Thomas Schroepfer at SUTD, her research focused on the increased benefits of integrated landscape design in high-density urban environments and the development of strategies towards evidence-based design practice for economically and socially sustainable urban design solutions. As a postdoc researcher and coordinator for the Dense and Green Cities module in the Future Cities Lab Global programme at the Singapore-ETH Centre, her current research focuses on urban scale studies and evaluating the performance of sustainable integrated districts, towards developing effective design strategies for future urban planning.