Jacob Babarinde, Papua New Guinea

Jacob Babarinde combines professional skills in real estate valuation and analysis, project viability and land use planning. He currently works as an Associate Professor of Property Studies at the Papua New Guinea University of Technology in South Pacific. As a chartered valuation surveyor, urban planner and licensed realtor with more than 30 years’ professional experience in Canada, England, Nigeria, Zambia, Namibia and Papua New Guinea, Jacob has a passion for city sustainability. He has served as a Visiting Research Fellow in forced migration at Oxford University and he is a Fellow of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (FRICS), London, UK. Jacob has co-authored two books on real estate and urban planning as well as published interesting peer-reviewed papers in international journals. He has served as a member of ISOCARP-UPAT on two occasions in Rijswijk Zuid in the Netherlands, and in Sitges-Barcelona in Spain. Jacob is currently serving on the ISOCARP/Moscow Urban Forum (MUF) team, working on an urban mobility research project with five other ISOCARP members who were selected from around the world. His research interests include: city sustainability in the face of terror attacks, forced migration, project viability, asset valuation, land tenure, and project management in land development.

Elizabeth Reynolds, United Kingdom/Australia

Elizabeth Reynolds is an Australian Urban Planner based in London where her company Urben specialises in planning, design and problem solving for urban environments. In addition to working on infrastructure and large-scale regeneration projects, Elizabeth is an active member of ISOCARP for whom she authored ‘NY-Lon Underground’, a study within Think Deep: Planning, development and use of underground space in cities – a book co-published with the International Tunneling Association Committee on Underground Spaces (ITACUS). On the subject of planning and designing spaces beneath cities, she has also spoken at two international conferences and received a Design Innovation Award from the Royal College of Art. In June 2015 Elizabeth was rapporteur for an ISOCARP Urban Planning Advisory Team charette in the Gaza Strip.  Elizabeth is interested in finding creative ways for cities to better manage their natural resources and plan strategically for long term change.

Local Co-rapporteur: Geci Karuri-Sebina

Geci Karuri-Sebina is Executive Manager for programmes at South African Cities Network, an urban research and learning network. Her interests span a range of development foresight, policy, planning and practice topics, particularly relating to urban governance, the built environment, innovation systems, and local development. She has two decades’ experience working and publishing in these fields. Her most recent publication is the book Innovation Africa  (Emerald Books, 2016).

Geci is a Council Member on the South African Council of Planners, and an Associate Research Fellow of the Institute for Economic Research on Innovation (IERI) and the National Research Foundation’s South African Research Chair on Innovation and Development. She is also a founding director of the Southern African Node of the Millennium Project, co-founder of ForesightForDevelopment.org, an Associate Editor for the African Journal for Science, Technology, Innovation and Development (Taylor & Francis), and Africa Regional Editor for Foresight: The journal of future studies, strategic thinking and policy (Emerald).