Jeffrey Craft

MSc in Cities, BLA, BA, OALA, CSLA, ASLA

Jeff is an urbanist with a focused practice in systems-based design.  His belief that real change from progressive and equitable urban policy is reliant on sound and creative design solutions is at the core of his professional beliefs.  Additionally, as Managing Design Principal at STUDIO tla, a Toronto and Dallas-based Urban Design and Landscape Architecture firm, he provides firm leadership and oversight in the design and management of complex private and public development projects.  Prior to joining STUDIO tla, Jeffrey was a Partner and Design Principal at the SWA Group, residing in Dallas and Shanghai. His clients include public agencies and the largest private developers of planned environments, civic, institutional, and mixed-use urban venues in North America, China, India, and the UAE. Jeffrey is recognized internationally as a leader in the design and development of award-winning master planning projects and is a frequent lecturer and keynote speaker focusing on issues related to urbanization. Jeffrey is a full member of the American Society of Landscape Architects, the Canadian Society of Landscape Architects and holds CLARB certification.

Jeffrey, along with each of his partners at ComplexCity holds a Masters Degree in Cities from the London School of Economics, the leading international centre informing global urban practice areas of design, finance and politics.

KARI KANKAALA

Dr. Sci., Lic. Tech, M.Sc. in Cities, M.Sc. EE

Kari is an advocate for urbanism and is currently working on and advising about three coinciding megatrends – climate change, circular economy and biodiversity – and how they affect the urban environments and the people and companies within. 

He brings to Complex(c)ities his extensive knowledge of 25 years in economic development, innovation policy, venture capital and technology transfer and a more recent decade-long urban development experience. Currently, Kari is also the Director for Development and Environment with the city of Tampere, Finland. 

Kari has a broad and extensive experience in urban and economic development of cities since 2002. Prior to that Kari worked internationally on technology commercialization including research based novel technologies and services, venture capital funding of start-ups and on knowledge based regional development. More recently, he has actively developed smart and sustainable city concepts and taken them into practice home and abroad. Kari is also experienced professional in housing policy and land property and development.

Earlier, Kari had a career in the private and public sectors in Finland and in the US.

MARC STEINLIN

M.Sc. in Cities, MA Sociology, CAS in International Development

Marc is deeply involved in creating prolific conditions, designing and facilitating conducive transformational processes in social systems, organisations, communities and more recently specifically in urban spaces.

With a background in sociology, international relations and international law (University of Zürich) he specialised in programme management and knowledge management in international development and cooperation. He worked for the international development NGO Helvetas (Switzerland) until migrating to South Africa, where he started his own boutique consulting company IngeniousPeoplesKnowledge Consultants (I-P-K) in 2006. Under his leadership, I-P-K has since delivered dozens of mandates for UN Agencies, international donor agencies, public sector institutions and civil society organisations across the entire African continent, in Europe and Asia.

He got increasingly entangled in grappling with issues of complexity at the source of many transformational challenges and has advanced the design and facilitation of highly participatory processes, from small group events to whole system processes and large multi-stakeholder platforms to create strategies, devise policies, innovate, leverage diversity and harness conflict constellations. He has consulted in a wide spectrum of issues, inter alia entrepreneurship promotion, gender/equality/diversity,  financial literacy and inclusion, green economy promotion, social protection, judiciary and police reform, participatory and situational leadership development, organisational development to name a few.