Connected Futures in Urban Space

Marie Kåstrup is the Head of Bicycle Program at the City of Copenhagen. She is responsible for the strategic planning of future investments in cycling as well as the development of innovation and partnership projects in the city. She is also in charge of monitoring, assessment and documentation of the city’s cycling-related activities.

Marie’s specialties include program management, policy, sustainable transport, strategic analysis, communication, planning, documentation, campaigns, usability, social networks, workshop facilitation, conceptualisation, public relations

Frank is an expert on future-driven innovation and knows how to make innovation work in big corporations.
Frank works from the knowledge that setting up a foresight-radar on the basis of megatrends is the first step to identify new opportunity search fields. The second is about turning opportunities into pipeline projects together with internal and external partners. Making both steps work in complex organizations requires strategic leadership and an entrepreneurial culture that engages with start-ups, accelerators and venture capital. This is where Frank excels.
Before joining CIFS, Frank was heading up Innovation Development at Novozymes where he was responsible for front-end innovation programs and collaborative innovation. Frank is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Expert Network and teaches as guest faculty at the Copenhagen Business School. He also is the speaker of the advisory board to the Chemical Invention Factory Berlin, an entrepreneurial development centre of the Berlin Technical University.

A visionary entrepreneur with an artistic edge

Rasmus is partner and design director, with a leg in both social science and design. He is an innovation geek, with a mind tuned to design thinking. Rasmus works at the forefront of development, with a critical understanding of the forces behind disruption, connecting technology, trends and human insights. He advises both public and private organisations on innovation, and helps strengthen their capacity at a strategic and tactical level. With over 100 workshops under his belt, Rasmus holds a unique ability to engage people in culture change.

A fiery catalyst for massive transformation

Line is the CEO and founder of IS IT A BIRD. She drives the company forward, bringing human needs into focus when innovating for society and business. Line is always one step ahead, and always open minded when defining the best direction – she never settles for the safe solution, and constantly pushes further for greater impact. Her ambition is to drive massive transformation by changing the way you do business.

Sofie Pelsmaker’s passion is for architecture teaching, practice and research that makes a difference and responds to current societal and environmental challenges. Her specialty is low energy, affordable housing design and housing retrofit. She is particularly interested in how buildings and spaces work in reality, and how architecture exists and changes over seasons and time. This includes how building use and users change and adapt buildings (i.e. actual performance and user satisfaction (POE/BPE), and how architecture shapes uses and users. She is also interested in pedagogical methods for embedding time, user and performance aspects, and in holistic sustainability approaches. In her work she attempts to bridge the information gap between research and architectural practice.

Gesine Junker is passionate about creating places which current and future generations can enjoy, with people who are committed to what they do.

In her current role at TfL, she is working on the Crossrail 2 railway scheme across London, linking the rail network in the Upper Lea Valley across central London to Wimbledon and further south into Surrey and Sussex. Primarily concerned with the urban integration of the scheme, it gives her a great opportunity to positively help shaping this city with this new infrastructure, its associated public realm and redevelopment of city fabric. This role includes working with local authorities, the GLA, government departments and the design team on issues relating to integrating the stations into the public realm, surface transport integration, commercially led redevelopment of worksites, as well as realising the wider regeneration benefits and housing delivery associated with the scheme. It draws on her wide experience in the field of architecture, urban design, regeneration and planning, as well as the passion for this city and delivery of infrastructure as a public good.

Since arriving in the UK in 2006, she has been working at a number of practices in the field of architecture, urban design, master planning and engineering.

Key elements of this experience include:

o Masterplans for large brownfield and greenfields sites;
o Planning applications, design codes and briefs;
o Regeneration projects and public realm design;
o Design competitions;
o Projects relating to movement, in particular rail infrastructure; and
o Mixed-use, housing led feasibility studies for high density locations.

Prior to coming to the UK, she worked in Shanghai and Germany in architecture, publishing – and cabinet making. Even though now far removed in scale, she has never regretted knowing how to actually build something.

Human Shojaee is Co-Founder Sustainary.org

During the last 18 years, Human has developed a passion for designing visionary frameworks for challenging issues in society through Collaborative Innovation Thinking and Human Centered Design across sectors.

During the last 5 years, Human has been in charge of creating systems to turn more university students and researches into entrepreneurs, designed and realized the University Startup World Cup reaching more than 3 million students, created the largest Startup-Mentor Program in the Nordics, laid the foundation for Corporate – University- Startup model, developed the first talent program for health tech in the Nordics and designed the strategy for UNLEASH; the world’s largest Innovation Lab for the Sustainable Development Goals.

As a spin-off from UNLEASH, Human has co-founded Sustainary; a new nonprofit initiative to transform more technologies and IPs as solutions for the SDGs.  Humans career so far reflects his cross-disciplinary profile; Co-founder of consulting company within Diversity Management, Danish Red Cross, Ministry of Treasure of Denmark (talent and diversity development), Division Director at NGO working with innovation and diversity, Founder of Brazil Agent (consulting company in real estate and investment in Brazil), Founder of DanishBrazilian Innovation Network (4th organization), CEO of Venture Cup, Chief Entrepreneur for UNLEASH and now Co-founder of Sustainary!

Human is a member of the Advisory board for Luxembourg University’s Center for Entrepreneurship and a board member of WE Love Startup and a tech talent chairman for the Nordic tech Advocates.

Professor Peter Madden, OBE, is Professor of Practice in City Futures at Cardiff University, Chair of Building with Nature, Founder Director of Ecovivid, and sits on the Boards of the Crown Estate and Bristol Energy.

Previously he was CEO of Future Cities Catapult and of Forum for the Future. He was also Director of Green Alliance, and Ministerial Adviser to the UK Government. He was awarded an OBE for services to sustainable development.