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Skye Duncan Joins NACTO as Global Street Design Director

Oct 30, 2014

NEW YORK (Oct 30, 2014) — NACTO is pleased to introduce Skye Duncan as its new Global Street Design Director. Skye is an urban designer with over a decade of experience in architecture, urban design, planning and landscape architecture, and she will lead the team initiating a new Global Cities Design Program, a multi-year initiative that will develop a Global Street Design Guide and work with cities on street and public space design around the world. Supported by the Bloomberg Initiative for Global Road Safety,  the program will refine and adapt the street design work that NACTO has successfully accomplished  in the largest American cities, leading to widespread local adoption of street design standards.  It will also facilitate cities learning from each other while developing additional approaches that can be applied to streets on an international scale.

“I am so thrilled to take on such important work and to continue learning and sharing lessons from the various innovations and challenges from different corners of the globe” said Duncan. “Streets are our most fundamental network of public open space in all cities and how they are designed can really shape the everyday quality of people’s lives. Keeping the human perspective at the center of how we judge these spaces is crucial to their success.”

“Skye combines the global vision and local know-how to help create a common language for designing streets that meet the demands of this increasingly urban age,” said Janette Sadik-Khan, NACTO chair.  “With 70% of the world’s population expected to live in urban areas by 2050, we need a global strategy for designing streets and public spaces that work for people and that offer more sustainable and better transportation choices.”

“This is an exciting time for NACTO to have Skye on board as we expand our scope to the international realm,” said Edward Reiskin, President of NACTO and Director of Transportation of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA). “We have expansive experience in supporting cities in the United States in rethinking the role of streets in their urban contexts, and now Skye’s unique and diverse experience will be a wonderful resource as we form new programs and partnerships through the Global Cities Design Program.”

Skye comes to NACTO after seven years working as a Senior Urban Designer at the New York City Department of City Planning in their Urban Design Office. There she offered her design expertise to help shape many sites of all scales across the five boroughs including Coney Island, Hudson Yards, Hunters Point South, Hudson Square, Astoria Cove, the North Shore Vision Plan and the recent Western Queens Transportation Study. She collaborated with multiple city agencies and organizations to make New York City a more sustainable, resilient, livable and healthy city, and contributed to the NYC DOT Street Design Manual. She also helped develop much of the Planning Department’s innovative work relating to public health and the built environment and was a contributing author to the award-winning Active Design Guidelines (2010).

Skye’s role leading a team to produce the well-received 2013 publication Shaping the Sidewalk Experience, brings to NACTO not only the knowledge of design elements within the street, but also of the many policies and stakeholders involved in shaping them. She has worked with cities around the world on dissemination of the sidewalk methodology and the Active Design Guidelines, and has worked professionally as an International Urban Design Consultant in New Zealand, Canada, and Brazil.

She has been an Associate Professor at Columbia University in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation for the past seven years and she graduated as a Fulbright Scholar there in the Master of Science in Architecture and Urban Design program in 2007. Skye also has a Bachelor of Architecture with Honors from Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand and worked in private sector architecture and landscape architecture firms there before moving to the United States.