Andrew Simmons

Andrew is an urban development strategist and social scientist committed to context-sensitive, integrated approaches to development. Working at the intersection of the public and private sectors, he provides interdisciplinary advisory and strategic planning that spans urban infrastructure and investment, climate-policy analysis and ESG-integration, knowledge capture and impact evaluation, place-based approaches to development and regional / spatial planning, and civic technology and citizen engagement in design and implementation.

As director of research for Resilience Brokers, Andrew works with a wide range of university research centres, civil society organisations, multilateral institutions, and global research networks to advance climate and social science research that is co-produced and accessible, to evaluate programme design and impact, and to facilitate feedback loops and peer-to-peer knowledge exchange and learning. Resilience Brokers, the global delivery programme of the Ecological Sequestration Trust, is a collaborative, knowledge-support and delivery network of partners combined with the “resilience.io<http://resilience.io>” integrated-systems modeling platform to support the implementation of more resilient development pathways for city-regions around the world.

Prior to joining the Trust’s Resilience Brokers Programme, Andrew worked as a project manager contractor on international development and domestic U.S. projects, including an award-winning mixed-use, mixed-income property development on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., completed in 2017. Past appointments include senior planner with Bluepath Consulting in China and lead heritage planner with PPJ consortium on the Greater Hanoi Master Plan for the Vietnam Ministry of Construction. With Arup, he formed and led a 'cultural planning' team of social scientists from the Shanghai office, within Arup’s London-based integrated city planning practice for their world-pioneering, sustainability-driven planning projects in China and beyond. He also assisted with Arup’s programme management of the EPSRC China-UK Ecoregion Research Networks.

Andrew has guest lectured at Catholic University's School of Architecture & Planning, CUNY's Sustainability in the Urban Environment graduate program for its environmental policymaking course, and at Tongji University in Shanghai, where he was also a jurist for CAUP's landscape architecture graduate studio. He is a member of the Bretton Woods Committee and is on the editorial board of Frontiers' open-access journal, Blockchain for Good ('B4G'). Andrew holds an MSc in City Design and Social Science from the London School of Economics, where his research focused on the London Olympic Park Legacy.