Thomas Stellmach

Thomas Stellmach is best known as founder of TSPA Making Cities, a planning practice with focus on strategic urbanism, and as planning expert for UN-Habitat. His focus of interest is sustainable urbanism in a transforming world. 

His work as a planner includes for example the strategic plan for Germany's Ruhr region, city transformation and extension projects in Baghdad, London and Berlin . In Russia, his firm developed projects in Moscow, Krasnoyarsk, Naberezhnye Chelny, and Kazan. 

He has taught at the Berlage in Rotterdam, NL, the University for Science & Arts in Aleppo, Syria, and lectured at Tsinghua University in Beijing, Strelka in Moscow, UPC in Barcelona, and AUB in Beirut among others. At present, he holds the chair for urban design at Riseba University in Riga.

For the United Nations he supported the programme for achieving sustainable urban development and coordinated pilot projects in the Philippines, Rwanda, and Mozambique; and developed a planning methodology and training format - the Rapid Planning Studio - for sustainable urban development. He currently works on solutions to improve urban resiliency through climate change adaption with UN-Habitat and the International Climate Initiative.

In Berlin, he has founded the 'urban coop berlin' housing cooperative to set an example how affordable housing can be achieved in the context of a developing housing crisis. The coop will start construction of its first housing project in the second half of 2018.