I have spent most of my life trying to understand why some cities thrive while others merely endure. It is a question that first fascinated me as a student of architecture and has since become the thread running through my work as an urbanist. My career has carried me from the orderly streets of Central Europe to the dense vibrancy of Asian megacities and the fast-changing urban landscapes of Africa and the Middle East. Everywhere I go, the same challenge presents itself in different guises: how do we shape places that allow people — all people — to live well?

Today, as one of the founders of MLA+, an international practice that works with this question every day. Our projects unfold in contexts as varied as coastal European town, sprawling Arabic cities, and fast-urbanising regions of South East Asia. They demand creative design, yes, but also a deep sensitivity to governance, economics, culture, and the everyday life that makes urbanism meaningful. I am most at home when moving between scales — from national spatial strategies to the texture of a single neighbourhood street — because that is where the real work of cities takes place.

Parallel to this, my role as Chief Technical Adviser to a nationwide planning reform in Saudi Arabia places me at the centre of a transformation that is as ambitious as it is complex. It is a role that requires both rigour and imagination: guiding institutions through unfamiliar terrain, aligning diverse actors around shared goals, and building tools that help visions become reality. I have come to understand that planning at this scale is less about producing a masterplan and more about cultivating a culture capable of making good decisions over time.

Before this, I learned to navigate complexity in the studios of OMA and KCAP, where I worked on projects that stretched across continents and political systems. There I understood that the future of cities is never written by architects alone — it is negotiated, contested, and constantly rewritten by the people who inhabit them and the systems that shape them. That insight continues to ground my work.

Teaching has been an equally important part of my journey. At the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture, where I served as Head of Urbanism and a full professor for Urban and Rural Planning at the Shenzhen International School of Design SISD, I worked with students who challenged me to articulate not only how we design cities, but why. Their questions sharpened my own thinking, and their energy reminded me that urbanism is a living discipline — restless, adaptive, and deeply human. Through lectures, essays, and my ongoing reflections on urban change, I try to share that sense of possibility with a wider audience.

Ultimately, my work — whether in practice, policy, or education — is driven by a belief that cities can and must do better. They must become fairer, more resilient, more imaginative in the face of climate change, and more honest about the inequalities they contain. I speak about these themes not as abstract concepts but as realities encountered in places I have worked: informal settlements negotiating survival, neighbourhoods reclaiming public space, governments rethinking their planning systems, communities reimagining their futures.

If I am invited to speak, it is usually for this blend of experience and reflection — the combination of hands-on international practice and a willingness to step back and read the deeper stories unfolding in our cities. My aim is not only to describe what is happening, but to provoke new ways of seeing and acting. Because the future of cities is not predetermined. It is something we have the chance — and the responsibility — to shape, together.