Creative Thought Leaders
Ethan Kent - Co-founder PlacemakingX
Ethan Kent works to support public space organizations, projects, and leadership around the world to build a global placemaking movement. Ethan has traveled to more than 1000 cities and 65 countries to advance the cause of leading urban development with inclusive public spaces and placemaking. In 2019 he co-founded PlacemakingX to network, amplify, and accelerate placemaking learning, leadership and impact globally. He builds on more than 20 years of working on placemaking projects and campaigns with Project for Public Spaces. Ethan has been integral to the development of placemaking as a transformative approach to economic development, environmentalism, transportation planning, governance, resilience, social equity, design, digital space, tourism and innovation.
Ethan has keynoted well over 100 of the top urbanism conferences and has helped organize dozens of the placemaking conferences that have most shaped the movement.
Reif Larsen - Executive Director, The Future of Small Cities Institute
Reif Larsen is Executive Director of The Future of Small Cities Institute, which creates inclusive and sustainable solutions for small and midsized post-industrial metros. The organization specializes in helping cities tell their stories by activating storefront spaces into “Urban Rooms” community places of dialogue, learning, and celebration.
A novelist and journalist, Reif has written widely on cities in transition, including London, Detroit,
Sarajevo, Los Angeles, Havana, Mexico City and Gothenburg. His work has been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, GQ, The Globe and Mail, The Harvard Review, Tin House, McSweeney’s, Virginia Quarterly Review, Asymptote Journal and The Believer. His first novel,
The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet, was a NY Times bestseller, translated into twenty-seven languages, and was adapted into a movie by Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Amélie). He has written several children’s books, including Uma Wimple Charts Her House, published in 2021. He is also a filmmaker and has shot documentaries in South Africa, the UK, and the USA. He lives in MA with his wife and two children.