Lucy Bullivant
Cities are being asked to decarbonise, densify, and absorb new populations through infrastructure that was not designed for any of those things. Most planning systems still optimise for delivery, not for long-term liveability or social cohesion. The hard question is no longer whether to retrofit and rebuild, but how to do it without producing places people will struggle to live in twenty years from now.
Lucy Bullivant is a place strategist, curator, and author who advises city governments, developers, and design teams on how to plan, retrofit, and rebuild urban places for long-term liveability.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Lucy Bullivant
- She has written the reference work on contemporary masterplanning. Masterplanning Futures (Routledge) won the Urban Design Group Book of the Year, and her thinking influences design review panels that approve real projects in London.
- She bridges urban planning critique and operational place strategy. Most speakers in this space do one or the other; Bullivant publishes peer-reviewed research, curates major exhibitions, and runs a working consultancy commissioned by clients.
- Her work on deep retrofit, hyperlocal media, and co-design gives organisations a vocabulary for participatory urbanism that goes beyond consultation theatre and connects to measurable place outcomes.
- She is an Honorary Fellow of RIBA who has curated exhibitions for Roca London Gallery, the Shenzhen Biennale, and The Building Centre, evidence that her authority is recognised across professional, academic, and cultural institutions.
Biography highlights
- PhD in adaptive planning, London Metropolitan University; MA Cultural History, Royal College of Art
- Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects (Hon FRIBA), elected 2010
- Author of Masterplanning Futures (Routledge), winner of the Urban Design Group Book of the Year, 2014; and Masterplanning Futures: Agents of Change (Routledge, 2026)
- Co-author of Recoded City: Co-Creating Urban Futures (Routledge, 2015) with Thomas Ermacora
- Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Urbanista.org
- Curator of Urbanistas (Roca London Gallery), Remake-We Make (Shenzhen Biennale), and Phoenix Rising and Retrofit 23 (The Building Centre)
Biography
Masterplans rarely fail at the design stage. They fail at the point where ambition meets the politics, capital cycles, and community expectations of the neighbourhood or city the plan has to live inside. Bullivant’s career has been built around closing that gap, both as a critic of how cities get planned and as a practitioner working inside design review and consultancy.
Masterplanning Futures, her Routledge book that won the Urban Design Group Book of the Year in 2014, set out a comparative reading of large-scale plans across cultures and remains a reference text for planning departments and architecture schools. Her follow-up, Masterplanning Futures: Agents of Change, is published by Routledge in autumn 2026. Recoded City, co-authored with Thomas Ermacora, extended the argument toward participatory and bottom-up regeneration, the territory all cities have to operate in.
Her credibility comes from working across the professional stack at once. She is an Honorary Fellow of RIBA, founder of Urbanista.org, and a Design Council expert. She chaired the Lambeth Design Review Panel from 2019 to 2025, and has sat on review panels for Enfield and the London Legacy Development Corporation, the panels that shape which projects in London get approved and built.
Her recent curatorial work, Phoenix Rising: Visions for Rebuilding Ukraine and Retrofit 23 at The Building Centre, and Urbanistas at Roca London Gallery, sits on the same axis: how to rebuild, retrofit, and reimagine cities under climate, conflict, and demographic pressures. The thread across her writing, consultancy, and curatorship is a single insistence, that liveability is the hard test of any urban strategy, and that planning systems still under-equip leaders and teams to meet it.
Key speaking topics
- Adaptive planning and masterplanning
- Deep retrofit and adaptive reuse of existing building stock
- Liveable urbanism and place quality
- Co-design and participatory placemaking
- Design review and design governance
- Urban regeneration and post-conflict rebuilding
- Climate adaptation in city strategy
Ideal for
- City and regional government leaders, planning directors, and chief design officers
- Property developers, masterplanning teams, and large-scale regeneration boards
- Architecture and engineering firm leadership commissioning urban strategy work
- Sustainability and ESG leads inside real estate, infrastructure, and built environment portfolios
Audience outcomes
- A clearer reading of why masterplans succeed or fail, drawn from comparative international case material
- Specific principles for deep retrofit at scale rather than project-by-project
- A working vocabulary for participatory placemaking that goes beyond consultation
- A sharper view of how design review and governance shape long-term place quality
- Reference points from leading European, Asian, and post-conflict rebuilding programmes
Talks
A talk on how hyperlocal media and digital tools can surface community priorities and inform real urban decisions.
Key takeaways:
- How hyperlocal platforms shift the balance between residents and planning authorities
- Examples of digital tools producing measurable social value in neighbourhoods
- What developers and city teams should and should not expect from community media
A structured account of the principles that make places liveable, drawn from international comparison.
Key takeaways:
- A working set of principles for assessing place quality
- How inclusion translates into design and governance choices
- Where most masterplans currently fall short on liveability
A talk built on the Routledge book of the same name, examining how long-horizon plans hold up under real-world pressure.
Key takeaways:
- How leading international masterplans have absorbed change over time
- The governance and design review structures that protect long-term place quality
- Where ambition typically meets resistance, and how to plan for it
A talk on moving deep retrofit from exemplar projects to systemic delivery.
Key takeaways:
- The constraints holding retrofit back at scale
- Examples of programmes that have moved beyond pilot stage
- What city, developer, and policy teams need to align for retrofit to compound
Videos
Testimonials
Fees
| EUR | GBP | USD | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Home Country | Under €12000 | Under £10,000 | Under $15000 |
| Asia Pacific | Under €12000 | Under £10,000 | Under $15000 |
| Europe | Under €12000 | Under £10,000 | Under $15000 |
| Middle East & Africa | Under €12000 | Under £10,000 | Under $15000 |
| South America | Under €12000 | Under £10,000 | Under $15000 |
| United Kingdom | Under €12000 | Under £10,000 | Under $15000 |
| US East Coast | Under €12000 | Under £10,000 | Under $15000 |
| US West Coast | Under €12000 | Under £10,000 | Under $15000 |
| Virtual | Under €12000 | Under £10,000 | Under $15000 |