Lucy Bullivant PhD Hon FRIBA is a place strategist, curatorial director, award-winning author, and public speaker with extensive global urban research and delivery experience gained through collaborating with and across the cultural, public and private sectors globally.
Lucy Bullivant & Associates strategises sustainable, culture-led solutions for the future of global cities and towns. Lucy’s focus is urban recovery and reinvention, higher design standards and experimental multidisciplinary strategies for liveable urbanism countering the negative effects of inequality, climate change and globalisation on communities. The latest exhibition she has curated is ‘Retrofit 23: Towards Deep Retrofit of Homes at Scale’ for the Building Centre (10 May-30 Sept 2023).
Experiencing Lucy’s talks provides profound insights into her international project work. She pinpoints priorities. strategies and resources, and inspires audiences to create new road maps based on critical awareness of innovative and adaptive ways of thinking and acting vital to survive and thrive in the 21st century.
Lucy has created and delivered more than 100 groundbreaking and popular projects of public value internationally: educational, cultural and engagement strategies, exhibitions, lectures, books, magazines, media features, videos and public information material on priorities for architecture, urban design, master-planning and place-making. As a Trustee of Temple Bar London she promotes diversity in the built environment.
Lucy works with local government, BIDS, cultural organisations and the third sector. In the last five years she has successfully delivered consultancy projects to Enfield Council; Bydel Bjerke local authority, Oslo; University of Qatar; ANCB, Berlin; the Building Centre and the Latvian Development and Investment Agency. She is chair of the Lambeth Design Review Panel; an Expert – Specialist (Design Council), a member of the Enfield Design Review Panel and formerly member of the London Legacy Development Corporation Quality Review Panel (2012-13).
Lucy was elected an Honorary Fellow of RIBA in 2010 for her services to architectural culture globally. She has a PhD in adaptive planning from the School of Art, Architecture and Design, London Metropolitan University and an MA(RCA) in Cultural History from the Royal College of Art, and is a Trustee of Temple Bar Trust and a Liveryman of the Chartered society of Architects. In the early 1990s Lucy was Heinz Curator of Architectural Programmes, Royal Academy of Arts, London, before founding Lucy Bullivant & Associates, her consultancy business working with museums and galleries, publishers, academic and professional bodies on a wide range of projects of public value: exhibitions, strategy, publications, debates and symposia.
As a groundbreaking, award-winning non-fiction author of over 10 titles on architecture and urban design published globally, Lucy has for 30 years chronicled innovative creative practices in architecture and urban design and their shape-shifting contributions to society. She is currently completing the second edition of her book Masterplanning Futures (Routledge, 2012) a global analysis of the ideals and processes of contemporary adaptive planning which won Book of the Year at the Urban Design Group Awards, 2014.
For many years a globally connected investigative journalist, Lucy has contributed to the Cities and International Development sections of The Guardian, The Financial Times, and specialist titles including Architects’ Journal, Architectural Review, Domus and Al Manakh, published as a special edition of Volume monitoring new developments in the Gulf Region. Lucy’s work has been featured in Monocle, Forbes, ADM (Milan) and Arkitekten (Sweden), and she has given radio and video interviews to Channel 4 and other European and international tv and print media.