Cities in Action: Expert Conversations for Urban Infrastructure Solutions
Speaker Information
An urban and land change scientist, Karen Seto is one of the world’s leading experts on contemporary urbanization and global change. She uses satellite remote sensing, field interviews, and modeling methods to understand how urbanization will affect the planet, including land change, food systems, biodiversity, and climate change. She has pioneered methods to reconstruct urban land use with satellite imagery and has developed novel methods to forecast urban expansion. She has conducted urbanization research in China for twenty years and in India for more than ten. Dr. Seto has served on numerous national and international scientific bodies. She was a coordinating lead author for the 2022 IPCC 6th Assessment Report and the 2014 IPCC 5th Assessment Report. For both reports she co-led the chapter on urban mitigation of climate change. She currently co-chairs the U.S. National Academies Climate Security Roundtable, established by the direction of Congress to help better understand and anticipate the ways climate change affects U.S. national security interests. She also co-chairs the U.S. National Academies Subcommittee on U.S.- China Scientific Engagement. From 2000 to 2008, she was faculty at Stanford, where she held joint appointments in the Woods Institute for the Environment and the School of Earth Sciences. She has received many awards for her scientific contributions, including the Outstanding Contributions to Remote Sensing Research Award from the American Association of Geographers.
Dr. Seto is an elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering, and a Fellow with the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She received a PhD in Geography from Boston University.
Speaker Information
Aromar Revi is the founding Director of the Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS). He is a global thought leader and educator with 40 years of interdisciplinary experience, and an alumnus of IIT Delhi and the University of Delhi's Law and Management schools.
He has led over 235 practice, policy, and research assignments worldwide. His interdisciplinary work spans sustainable development, urbanization, climate science, and disaster risk reduction. Aromar has advised the Government of India, UN agencies, and international institutions on urban and economic governance, finance, and environmental change.
Aromar is Co-Chair of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, a member of the UCLG-Ubuntu, and the Global Commission on the Economics of Water. He is a CLA of multiple IPCC reports and one of South Asia's leading disaster risk reduction professionals.
Speaker Information
David Kooris is the first Executive Director of the newly-formed Connecticut Municipal Redevelopment Authority (MRDA), a statewide quasi-public authority established to provide towns and cities across Connecticut with the resources necessary to realize substantial housing production in their downtowns and transit station areas.
Mr. Kooris previously held various public and civic sector positions focused on urban revitalization and placemaking, resilience and emissions reduction, and coordinated land use and transportation planning including: President of Stamford Downtown; Board Chair of the Connecticut Port Authority; Deputy Commissioner at the Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development; Director of Resilience at the Connecticut Department of Housing; Director of the Office of Planning and Economic Development and Executive Director of the Redevelopment Agency for the City of Bridgeport; and Vice President and Connecticut Director at Regional Plan Association.
Since 2012, Mr. Kooris has been a lecturer at Yale University’s School of Environment and in Spring 2025 will transition to Yale’s School of Architecture.
The Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS), in collaboration with the Hixon Center for Urban Sustainability, Yale University, bring together experts from diverse fields to discuss comparative approaches to driving sustainable change in cities. For our inaugural webinar we are happy to have Aromar Revi, Director, IIHS, and David Kooris, Executive Director, Connecticut Municipal Redevelopment Authority. The conversation will be moderated by Karen Seto, Director, Hixon Center for Urban Sustainability, Yale University.
The webinar focuses on the emerging issue of infrastructure resilience in the face of rapid environmental change, especially climate change in a rapidly urbanising world. A critical component to enable sustainable development and build resilience to deal with the challenges of environmental change is to develop and retrofit massive new urban and regional infrastructure. This will require significant new investment in the right places by realigning public investments and incentivising private and blended investment, towards low carbon and resilient infrastructure.
The speakers will discuss the importance of resilient infrastructure as a systemic response to address the global polycrisis including poverty, inequality, climate change and water insecurity, biodiversity loss, debt, and intergovernmental fragmentation. This will include action taken on multiple scales from the local to the global. The speakers will discuss paths forward to achieve the development of both resilient infrastructure and infrastructure for resilience across social, economic and fiscal dimensions.
