Citymaking Studio — The Foundry Session

Developed the Experience Improvement District (XID) concept — from the Conscious Cities Index research in Singapore (2020), through an Oxford dissertation, into live practice across the UK and India. Anchors the Studio in its core principles.

Four decades framing the cultural and creative life of cities, from the Creative City to the Civic City. Grounds the Studio in the long view: a place is judged by the lived experience it produces over time, not the functions it optimises today.

Works at the intersection of biodiversity, regeneration and the built environment. Brings the Studio the living systems a neighbourhood has to protect, repair and grow with if it is to adapt to its residents across decades, not just seasons.

Landscape architect and Singapore's 2023 Designer of the Year, recognised for turning the city's drainage canals into thriving biodiverse public landscapes. Shows the Studio how blue and green infrastructure becomes the soft fabric of an adaptive neighbourhood.

Southeast Asia's first trained Biomimicry Professional and a National Geographic Explorer, designing buildings and districts that learn from nature. Pushes the Studio to set ecology as the first principle of a neighbourhood, not the landscaping pass.

Co-founder of REMIXD and an architect of the Experience Improvement District (XID) — a framework that reimagines neighbourhoods as net producers of human wellbeing. Anchors the Studio in design, neuroscience and lived experience: what cities feel like, not only what they look like.

Founder of The Curiosity Experiment, a practice exploring how curiosity, creativity and human-centred enquiry shape healthier organisations and places. Brings the disciplines of facilitation, behavioural insight and lived experience into the way the Studio convenes, learns and decides.

Founded The Big Sit, a global public mindfulness movement inspired by the Conscious Cities Index research — scaling for the city what Ramsgate's Happy Mondays does for a town. Helps the Studio design for the rhythms of attention, rest and repair.

Stages large-scale public artworks that turn heritage sites into live cultural events at city scale, from Lumiere to Royal de Luxe. Reminds the Studio that legacy is not preserved on a plaque — it is renewed each time the place gathers around it.

Leads Dhun, a first-principles XID prototype reimagining a heritage district ecology-first. Brings the Studio a working answer to how memory, ritual and built form can carry a place into its next century without freezing it in the last one.

Designs adaptive reuse and cultural infrastructure that hold heritage and contemporary practice in the same building. Shows the Studio how legacy can live on as working civic fabric — used, edited and inhabited, not preserved as artefact.

Designs participation processes and creative engagement programmes that put residents at the centre of place-shaping. Brings the Studio its method for building culture and identity from the ground up, so a place belongs to those who live it.

Brings the legacy lens to placemaking — designing streets, parks and harbours for the full arc of a life. Holds the Studio to the long horizon: the places we shape today must adapt and endure as the communities living in them grow older.

Stewards a long-running, family-led practice of cultural patronage and community participation across Madhya Pradesh. A lived example for the Studio of legacy as a living institution — culture sustained across generations, not staged for a season.