President, European Council of Spatial Planners – Conseil européen des urbanistes
Registered spatial planner in Italy. Born and grown up in Southern Germany, in 1984 he moved to Venice, Italy where he graduated in Urban and Regional Planning at IUAV University, after completing a full-cycle five-year course. His professional activity started in the 1990s, which involved making plans, multicriteria evaluation, environmental planning in the Venice Lagoon, valorisation of Venetian historical military heritage in Venetia and the Eastern Mediterranean, reclamation of contaminated mega sites, feasibility studies, geospatial information science, cartography and remote sensing. In recent times, he is more and more focusing on vision and scenario building for metropolitan and urban contexts, as well as for structurally disadvantaged areas, paying much attention to nature restoration planning. He collected important work experience in Angola, Germany and of course Italy. During his first 10-15 years of activity, academic research and teaching, mostly at IUAV, occupied an important position, too. In 2010 he co-founded HESC spatial consulting, a private planning and design firm based in Venice.
In 2002 he joined ASSURB, the Italian national association of professional spatial planners, which was founded in 1977 after the first graduation course in “urbanistics” was established in Italy in 1971. From 2004 to 2010 and again from 2016 he was/is member of its national council, since 2017 he is one of its two delegates to the ECTP-CEU, and from 2019 to 2022 he was ASSURB’s president.
He is ECTP-CEU president for the current two-year period 2023-2025 and was previously (2021-2023) its vice president. His main interests and activities at the ECTP-CEU are focused on promotion, strengthening and formal recognition of spatial planning as a distinct and robust profession in Europe. From 2018 to early 2022 he chaired an ECTP-CEU working group on migration and inclusion, which remains one of his main topics to this day. After the Russian aggression against Ukraine, he is particularly committed to supporting the Ukrainian colleagues in their post-war recovery planning efforts. On behalf of the ECTP-CEU he is participating in the “Rebuilding Ukraine” focus group within the Davos Baukultur Alliance of the World Economic Forum.
