The Third Annual Healthy Cities Conference

Keynote

The Governance of Implementing Healthy Cities
9:00am – 10:30am
Coming Soon!

Keynote Speaker

Jacqueline Cramer

Professor Dr. Jacqueline Cramer has always combined her academic career for over 45 years with being a practitioner in sustainability working in both industry and government. Presently, she is director of Cramer Milieuadvies (Sustainable Entrepreneurship; Strategy & Innovation Consultancy, founded in 1999) and emeritus professor of sustainable innovation at Utrecht University. Before Cramer was professor at various universities since 1990. She has served as a member on over 120 influential boards of government, industry, and non-profit organizations. Cramer is currently focused on transitioning to a circular economy. In this role, she serves as a special envoy of Holland Circular Hotspot, Chairman of the execution of the Sustainable Concrete and Construction Steel Agreements, Chairman of the Dutch Circular Textile Valley, and Patroness of the Plastic Soup Foundation. Before she was Minister of Housing, Spatial Planning and the Environment for the Netherlands (2007–2010). 

Panellists

Leia Minaker

Director, Future Cities Institute, University of Waterloo, and Associate Professor, School of Planning, University of Waterloo

Leia Minaker is the inaugural Director of the Future Cities Institute at the University of Waterloo, and an Associate Professor in the School of Planning in the Faculty of Environment. She holds a PhD in Public Health and her research focuses on designing cities to improve health, with a focus on urban food systems and urban design for mental health. She is currently leading a research project that uses machine learning to identify high-rise buildings across Canada to develop the first national dataset on high-rises. Her team will link this dataset to environmental health databases to look at how high-rises are associated with health exposures and outcomes in Canada. Prior to accepting the role of Director, she served as Director of Waterloo’s Survey Research Centre for three years. She currently also serves as Treasurer of the Faculty Association of University of Waterloo.

Barb Swartzentruber

Barb Swartzentruber is Senior Fellow, Smart Prosperity Institute and Senior Advisor, Canadian Alliance for Net-Zero Agri-food.  She works as a strategist, catalyst, and connector with government, businesses and communities to respond to urgent social, economic, and environmental challenges through civic innovation, regenerative practices, and circular economy strategies. 

As a global leader in place-based innovation, system change and community capacity building, she convened and led a collaboration of local governments, business, academic and community leaders to win Canada’s Smart City Challenge. Built on a shared vision and goals, and a distributed leadership and governance model, they co-produced a portfolio of over 60 system change projects for re-imagining a circular, sustainable regional food system.   Barb has taught public policy, intergovernmental relations, community development, and system change at several Canadian universities. She was appointed to the Council of Canadian Academies Expert Panel on the Circular Economy in Canada in 2020 which co-produced the Turning Point Report

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