Bio

Lucy Bullivant PhD Hon FRIBA, founder/director, Lucy Bullivant & Associates

Lucy Bullivant © Sam Irons.
Lucy at the Chengdu Architecture Biennale, Chengdu, China, during her research trip to the city in 2013.
Lucy in conversation with Sir David Adjaye OBE at the V&A, an event staged as part of the Talking Architecture series she curated and presented, 2010-12.
Lucy chairs The soft stuff is the hard stuff, Roca London Gallery, 2015, with architects Alessandra Cianchetta (left) and Alison Brooks (right), an event held in conjunction with Urbanistas: women innovators in architecture, urban and landscape design, the exhibition Lucy curated for the venue.

Short bio

Lucy Bullivant PhD Hon FRIBA

British place strategist, curatorial director and author

Lucy Bullivant PhD Hon FRIBA is a place strategist, curatorial director, award-winning author, a keynote speaker, the founder and Creative Director, Urbanista.org, her webzine on liveable urbanism, and Expert – Specialist, Design Council, London.

Her consultancy firm, Lucy Bullivant & Associates, has worked for over 25 years with international clients including the Building Centre, ETH Zurich, Enfield Council, kommune Bydel Bjerke Oslo, the Latvian Investment and Development Agency, ANCB Berlin and Qatar University. From April-Dec 2022 she was Head of Engagement, Oxford Street, Westminster City Council, as a Public Practice Associate.

Lucy has been chair of the Lambeth Design Review Panel since June 2019. She is also a Trustee of Temple Bar London, the educational trust in July 2020, curating the monthly talk series at Temple Bar on Paternoster Square, and a member of Court, Worshipful Company of Chartered Architects.

She was elected an Honorary Fellow of RIBA in 2010, a lifetime honour, for her contribution to architectural culture globally.

Lucy has a PhD from London Metropolitan University’s School of Art, Architecture and Design, ‘From Masterplanning to Adaptive Planning: understanding the contemporary tools and processes for civic urban order’, and an MA(RCA) in Cultural History, from the Royal College of Art.

Her publications include Masterplanning Futures (2012), winner of the Book of the Year award by Urban Design Group (2014), published in a second edition in 2021 and 4d Hyperlocal (Guest Editor, AD/Wiley, 2017), and she has written extensively on architecture and urban design, and judged many competitions ranging from ArchMarathon to AJ Architecture Awards over many decades.

She has staged successful exhibitions at the Oslo Architecture Triennale (Dugnad Days, 2019); Shenzhen Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture (Remake We Make, 2015-6) and the São Paulo Biennale of Architecture (Frontiera Livre, 2017); Roca London Gallery (Urbanistas: women innovators in architecture, urban and landscape design, 2014) and for clients including Vitra Design Museum, the British Council and Milan Triennale.

Lucy has given numerous keynotes and chaired many events globally, and is represented by Speakers Associates.

Lucy’s full length bio

Lucy Bullivant’s current consultancy resumé is online here.

Further LB&A project information is available on the Selected Projects page, online at Linkedin, and at lucybullivant.net, an online archive of many of Lucy’s projects to 2018 including Space Invaders (British Council) and The near and the far, fixed and in flux (Milan Triennale).

More information about Lucy

Lucy Bullivant is a London-born place vision strategist, curatorial director, award-winning author and public speaker with extensive, high level experience in collaborating with the cultural, third, public and private sectors internationally. She conceives and delivers original, top quality content, concepts and outputs – strategies, programmes, publications, exhibitions, conferences, engagement and brainstorming workshops, seminars and videos of demonstrable public value.

Through her specialist niche consultancy firm, Lucy Bullivant & Associates, Lucy has worked nationally and internationally for clients including ETH Zurich, on the ‘Designing Urban Imaginaries in Colombia’ forum and Colombia Urban Transformation Program publication; Enfield Council’s Place Department, for whom she is author of the Meridian Water Placebook; Qatar University, as speaker, editorial director and publisher for the Sustainable Urbanism New Directions international workshop; the Latvian Development and Investment Agency; Roca, London and Barcelona; the 3rd Nordic Urban Forum; ANCB Berlin; and the Tallinn Architecture Biennale 2017. 

The original concepts and editorial content Lucy creates are supported by her thorough empirical research, and well structured for the needs of specific reader groups. For many of her projects she assembles first rate specialists in architecture, urban design, landscape architecture, participatory and graphic design, and copy editors, to meet the client’s needs.

Nordhavn, an emerging district of Copenhagen. COBE, Sleth, Polyform and Rambøll, for CPH City & Port Development. Masterplan for 3.6million m² new city district in former industrial harbour area, including development plan, district plans, design of public spaces, streetscapes and promenades, landscaping, bicycle infrastructure and metro stations. Lucy has written a new chapter about Copenhagen for the second edition of her award-winning book Masterplanning Futures, Routledge (2012), published in 2021.

Lucy has successfully authored and delivered over 12 full length publications on innovative architecture, urban design, adaptive masterplanning and creative placemaking including the Meridian Water Placebook for Enfield Council (2018-), and the 313 page book Masterplanning Futures, for Routledge, 2012, which won the Urban Design Group Book of the Year Award, 2014; Recoded City: Co-creating urban futures, with Thomas Ermacora (Routledge, 2016); New Arcadians: emerging UK architects (Merrell, 2012), and Anglo Files: UK architecture’s rising generation (Thames & Hudson, 2005). She has been editorial director for over 30 publications including 4D Hyperlocal: a Cultural Toolkit for the Open-Source City (Wiley/AD), Home Front (Wiley/AD) on new public housing. Lucy’s publications are based on her original international research, including field trips to locations such as Chengdu; Queensland; Copenhagen; NYC; Mexico City; São Paulo; Rio; Istanbul; and Tokyo, as well as across the UK.

4D Hyperlocal: A Cultural Tool Kit for the Open-source City, Guest-Editor, Lucy Bullivant, AD (Wiley), 2017.

Lucy is the founder and creative director of Urbanista, her webzine on liveable urbanism, created to fill a gap in high quality specialist media analysis of tools and processes. She writes for the leading UK industry titles New London Quarterly, Architects’ Journal, Architectural Review and Architecture Today. She has researched and written numerous published features for specialist architecture and design magazine titles globally over three decades and for national newspapers, 1990-, including The Guardian, The Financial Times and The Scotsman, drawing on her own global research trips. Lucy’s magazine clients over the years have included: AD (UK), RIBAJournal (UK), RocaGallery.com (on architecture and design, the future and the sustainable world), Landscape (UK), World Architecture (UK), Blueprint (UK), Building Design (UK), Harvard Design Magazine (US), OculusAIA (US), Architectural Record (US), Metropolis (US), Archis (NL), Volume (NL), Domus (IT), Platform (IT),The Plan (IT), Design Report (DE), A+U (JP), Indesign (AUS) and Habitus (AUS).

As an artistic director Lucy has curated, directed and delivered hundreds of successful and innovative creative projects of different scales of public value for international clients, cultural organisations, academia, publishing and medical and cultural charities, meeting goals on time and on budget. Focusing on architecture, urban and interactive design and the visual arts, these include more than 30 popular and groundbreaking exhibitions internationally, including the 2015 exhibition Urbanistas: women innovators in architecture, urban and landscape design she curated for Roca Design Gallery, London, which was successfully staged at the venue and at the Core, Science Central, Newcastle, in collaboration with Northern Architecture, developers Igloo and Creative Space Management.

Urbanistas: women innovators in architecture, urban and landscape design, the exhibition Lucy curated for Roca London Gallery, 2015, which toured to the Core, Science Central, Newcastle.

Space Invaders: new British architecture, the exhibition she co-curated for the British Council with Pedro Gadanho, Director of the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, Lisbon, toured globally for 3 years (2001-3). The major exhibition Kid size: the material world of childhood she co-curated with Vitra Design Museum, Germany, toured globally to museums and galleries for 8 years (1997-2005), accruing significant levels of revenue she generated in close collaboration with fellow team members from participating venues. Lucy was Commissioner and Curator of ‘The near and the far, fixed and in flux’, the UK pavilion for the XIX Milan Triennale, 1996.

The Milan Triennale building, Milan, Italy, where Lucy staged ‘The near and the far, fixed and in flux’, the UK pavilion for the XIX Milan Triennale, 1996, as curator and Commissioner of the UK Pavilion supported by the Foreign Office of the UK government.

Lucy has scouted out and managed the participation of many innovative global creative talents in architecture, design, art and film, in the numerous cultural events she has initiated globally.

Lucy fosters debate and reflection on many interrelated aspects of liveable urbanism through her writings, exhibitions, talks and chairing of events. In an interview for Forbes in summer 2018 she discusses new community-led models for planning and architecture addressing the UK housing crisis.

Engaging public talks on topical aspects of architecture and urban design are an ideal way to convey current thinking and ongoing international research, and advocate for best practice, and Lucy has recently made presentations as part of Post-COVID Cities: Reinventing World Cities, staged by AIA NYC (2021), and at the Architectural Association (2022); London Design Biennale 2018 (Latvia Day); 3rd Nordic Urban Lab2018; Qatar University, Sustainable Urbanism New Directions Workshop 2016; World Cities Culture Shanghai Symposium 2016; AIA NYC Center for Architecture; ANCB Berlin; Moscow Urban Forum 2016; Strelka Institute, Moscow; Smart City Forum, Barcelona and Casablanca; COAC and IAAC, Barcelona; Amsterdam School of Creative Leadership; Pakhuis de Zwijger, Amsterdam, and de Baak (Dutch public sector management organisation); Venice Architecture Biennale; TEDx Vienna; Royal Society of Arts; Barbican Centre, London; Lime Wharf cultural innovation hub, London; RIBA, London; Royal College of Art; Architectural Association, London; University of Westminster; UCL London; University of Plymouth; Yorkshire Forward; Syracuse University, NY; UCLA, Los Angeles; University of Houston; ETH Zurich (Territorial Encounters, Future Cities Laboratory); University of Rome; Swedish Association of Architects; University of Tampere; National Council of Architecture, Finland, and the Institute of Malaysian Architects, Kuala Lumpur. 

She has chaired numerous roundtables, most recently Dugnad Days – Sletteløkka, at the Oslo Architecture Triennale (2022). Her chairing includes the Temple Bar London online talks series (2020-22) and in-person talks at Temple Bar; the Urban Manifesto online series (2020-2021) with Prathima Manohar, the Softspace conference at Tate Modern, Spaced Out at the ICA London.

Strelka Institute, Moscow, where Lucy staged a Saturday morning seminar on interactive architecture and lectured on adaptive masterplanning.

She continues to regularly review a wide range of buildings, building types and urban plans nationally and internationally in the course of her consultancy work and for the specialist media. Read her discussion of the award-winning planning project Rectory Farm in Hounslow by Carmody Groarke and Vogt Architects in the April 2018 issue of Architectural Review here, and her critical analysis of Grenfell for Roca Gallery, Sept 2018 here.

Lucy is a judge of international design competitions such as the AJ Architecture Awards, RIBA London Awards, ArchMarathon and the LEAF Awards. She provides extensive specialist guidance to clients nationally through her work as a Built Environment Expert for the Design Council, as a member of the Enfield Place and Design Quality Panel, Lambeth Design Review Panel, the Brent Design Review Panel and the Yorkshire Design Review Service, and formerly as a member of the London Legacy Development Corporation Quality Review Panel (2012-13), Scientific Committee of the Institut pour la Ville en movement, Paris (2012-16), and as a Renaissance Advocate for Yorkshire Forward, Leeds (2007-10). She has worked as a professor for Syracuse University’s London branch (Architecture Department) and been a guest critic for numerous academic juries nationally and internationally.

Both independently and together with architect Alex Furunes, Lucy stages brainstorming and making workshops to promote awareness and skills in participatory design among community groups, local authority staff, developers, students and academic teachers. They developed Dugnad Days, a community placemaking project based in a suburb of Oslo selected for the Oslo Architecture Triennale 2019.

Kuala Lumpur: Lucy gave a keynote lecture at Datum: KL International Architectural Design Conference, theme Second Nature, in 2010.

Lucy was elected an Honorary Fellow of RIBA in 2010, a lifetime honour, for her contribution to architectural culture globally. She has a PhD from London Metropolitan University’s School of Art, Architecture and Design, ‘From Masterplanning to Adaptive Planning: understanding the contemporary tools and processes for civic urban order’, and an MA(RCA) in Cultural History, from the Royal College of Art.

Lucy’s full length bio

Lucy Bullivant’s current consultancy resumé is online here.

Further LB&A project information is available on the Selected Projects page, online at Linkedin, and at lucybullivant.net, an online archive of many of Lucy’s projects to 2018 including Space Invaders (British Council) and The near and the far, fixed and in flux (Milan Triennale).