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Lucy Bullivant

Leading place vision strategist and award-winning author
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About

Gender: Female
Nationality: United Kingdom
Languages: English
Travels from: United Kingdom

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Biography Highlights

  • Strategising solutions for global cities’ regenerative futures, Lucy is an award-winning advisor and author, a dynamic public speaker, and the founder of Lucy Bullivant and Associates and Urbanista.org webzine
  • Leading nnovative community co-design and engagement - London and Oslo
  • Phoenix Rising: Visions for Rebuilding Ukraine - creating a major exhibition and events platform in London, 2025-, about the world's largest reconstruction project

Biography

Lucy Bullivant’s background

Lucy Bullivant PhD Hon FRIBA is a place strategist, curatorial director, award-winning author, and public speaker with extensive global experience gained through collaborating with and across the cultural, public and private sectors globally. Lucy was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 2010 for her services to architectural culture globally.

Lucy Bullivant & Associates strategises sustainable, culture-led solutions for the future of global cities and towns. Lucy’s focus is urban recovery and reinvention, higher design standards and experimental multidisciplinary strategies for liveable urbanism countering the negative effects of inequality, climate change and globalisation on communities. She has curated groundbreaking exhibitions including ‘Retrofit 23: Towards Deep Retrofit of Homes at Scale’, and 2025-6, ‘Phoenis Rising: Visions for Rebuilding Ukraine’ (co-curated with Arthur Kay), for the Building Centre, and for other leading venues globally.

Experiencing Lucy’s talks gives you access to her profound insights arising from her international project work. She pinpoints priorities. strategies and resources, and inspires audiences to create new road maps based on critical awareness of innovative and adaptive ways of thinking and acting vital to survive and thrive in the 21st century.

Lucy has created and delivered more than 100 groundbreaking and popular projects of public value internationally: educational, cultural and engagement strategies, exhibitions, lectures, books, magazines, media features, videos and public information material on priorities for architecture, urban design, master-planning and place-making. As a Trustee of Temple Bar London she promotes diversity in the built environment.

Lucy works with local government, BIDS, cultural organisations and the third sector. In the last five years she has successfully delivered consultancy projects for Enfield Council; Bydel Bjerke local authority, Oslo; University of Qatar; ANCB, Berlin; the Building Centre and the Latvian Development and Investment Agency. From 2019-25 she was chair of the Lambeth Design Review Panel; an Expert – Specialist (Design Council); and is a serving member of the Enfield Design Review Panel, and formerly member of the London Legacy Development Corporation Quality Review Panel (2012-13).

Lucy has a PhD in adaptive planning from the School of Art, Architecture and Design, London Metropolitan University and an MA(RCA) in Cultural History from the Royal College of Art. She is Trustee of Temple Bar Trust and a Liveryman of the Architects Company.

Lucy was the first Heinz Curator of Architectural Programmes, Royal Academy of Arts, London, before founding Lucy Bullivant & Associates, her consultancy business working with museums and galleries, publishers, academic and professional bodies on a wide range of projects of public value: exhibitions, strategy, publications, debates and symposia.

As a groundbreaking, award-winning non-fiction author of over 10 titles on architecture and urban design published globally, Lucy has for 30 years evaluated and chronicled innovative creative practices in architecture and urban design and their shape-shifting contributions to society. Forthcoming is Masterplanning Futures: Agents of Change (Routledge, 2026), her global analysis of the ideals and processes of adaptive sustainable planning – an extensive reworking of her book Masterplanning Futures (2012), which won Book of the Year at the Urban Design Group Awards, 2014.

Lucy has been a globally connected investigative writer for a number of decades. She has contributed to the Cities and International Development sections of The Guardian, The Financial Times, Forbes, Architects’ Journal, Architectural Review, Volume, Archis, Domus, Harvard Design Magazine and Al Manakh, published as a special edition of Volume monitoring new developments in the Gulf Region. Lucy’s work has been featured in Monocle, ADM (Milan) and Arkitekten (Sweden), and through radio and video interviews to Channel 4, Monocle and other European and international tv and print media.

Videos

Speaking videos

Popular Talks

Available: In person, Virtually

How your smart phone is transforming your sense of place and opening up possibilities for shared social value

Available: In person, Virtually
Available: In person, Virtually

10 non-negotiable principles and values for inclusive civic change, from Adaptation to Justice (A-J)

Available: In person, Virtually

The rise of participatory design by local communities and social enterprises with local government and by themselves is opening the door to a new creative era of localism

Available: In person, Virtually
Available: In person, Virtually

Culture as a key driver of innovative planning and placemaking in the 21st century supporting social cphesion and resilience

Available: In person, Virtually

The rigid top down masterplan methods of the past are being replaced by a much more holistic and inclusive step-by-step approach with resilience and sustainability as their goal.

Available: In person, Virtually

Retrofit as a means to overcoming fragmented systems and boost health, wellbeing and local economies

Lucy'S

Testimonials

Thank you once more for your excellent lecture and participation in Re-City 2017. I hope you had a lovely weekend in Tampere and a safe travel to home.

Juho Rajaniemi

Professor of Urban Planning

Tampere University of Technology, Finland (Re-City conference & keynote, 2017)

I work with Lucy on the LEAF Architectural Awards. Her knowledge & her hard work as a judge as well as presenting the awards in 2011 was faultless. She is always happy to help and I am pleased that once again she is on the judging panel for the 2012 award show.

Natasha Raynor

Global Digital Sales Manager

CNN International, London (presenter of the LEAF international architectural awards 2011, staged at the 5-star Landmark Hotel, Marylebone, London)

I recently served as Dr Lucy Bullivant’s mentor for her PhD by Prior Output at the CASS, London Metropolitan University (where I was PhD supervisor, 2010-17) based on her award-winning book Masterplanning Futures, 2012, essays and exhibitions. Lucy has a remarkably rich, wide ranging knowledge of international contemporary cities. Her continuous enquiry and generosity with her audiences captures imaginations and future collaborators. She draws on architectural and urban history, planning, anthropology, politics, economics, ecology, sociology and design practice to enrich her publications, lectures, conferences and exhibitions. Her energy, commitment and sound judgement means she occupies a quite singular position in a field of deep significance to the Anthropocene crisis. We are indebted to her for our better understanding of the shift in city-making from top-down design and systems to an engaged, bottom up orchestration of sustainable creative civic life, with communication and collaboration addressing a much wider constituency than professional discourse among experts. She embeds her consultancy approach within the possibilities and limitations of concrete conditions, benefitting from an unusually broad range of colleagues and collaborators: politicians, business leaders, academics, architects, urbanists and ordinary citizens. I have nothing but admiration for Lucy’s work. I recommend her in the very highest terms, without reservation.

Peter Carl

Distinguished Professor

Chinese University of Hong Kong, formerly Visiting Professor, Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, 2017-2019

Lucy Bullivant is a compelling, engaging and responsive speaker; she’s comfortable with audiences in a large auditorium, as well as with smaller professional panels. Often the two are in combination and Lucy handles this well. She has an ability to guide her listeners and shift their focus, from her supporting videos/photos to a panel member’s input, whilst offering historical reflection, artistic principles and practical information. She also has an interesting dynamic voice and uses it well. She appears to be at the top of her profession in experience and scholarship and is able to relay this both to experts and those who might be new to her subject.

Ellen Newman

Senior Voice Tutor and Head of Voice

RADA (Royal Academy of Dramatic Art), 1995-2012 (2019)

The presence of Lucy Bullivant caused a stir in the room. She is an author and advisor who researches processes of urban design and innovative synergies, known for her articles on architecture in The Guardian and publications including Masterplanning Futures… Bullivant defined and exemplified the new priorities of contemporary urban planning: the social equality of citizens, the diversification of land uses, the need to reinvent the infrastructure, and the achievement of ecologically advanced results.

Lluis Comeron and Roger Subirà

Secretaria

Collegi d’Arquitectes de Catalunya (COAC), Barcelona, Spain (Congrés d’Arquitectura, COAC, 2016)

Bullivant’s presentation was like a speed-mentoring session through her very thoughtful and detailed book, beginning with the over-arching premise that there has been a “necessary evolution” from 20th-century top-down master planning, which tended towards a “cut-and-paste urbanism,” to 21st-century bottom-up “adaptive” planning. The challenges facing cities and regions today, she said, require “a dynamic relationship and equilibrium” between those top-down aspirations of the past” and “bottom-up thinking” of today.

Kirsten Richards

Editor, Oculus

AIA NYC chapter (Launch event for Lucy’s book, Masterplanning Futures, AIA Center of Architecture, NYC, 2013)

I invited Lucy to lecture to our Masters students of architecture at the Royal College of Art. She gave the most well prepared, fluent and cogent talk of the whole series, packed with research and thoughts, and brilliantly illustrated with a generous pack of slides.

Alex Haw

Atmos (art + architecture), Tutor

Department of Architecture, Royal College of Art, London

Books

Speaker Bureaus and Talent Agencies

Lucy Bullivant is available to book via these agencies
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Speakers Associates
Speaking Agency
Agent: Esther Nelson