Brian Bridgeman is the Commissioner of Planning and Economic Development for the Regional Municipality of Durham. He’s been with the Region since 2005 and was at the Town of Ajax before that. In terms of private sector experience, Brian worked as a planner at a major Toronto law firm; then with a Toronto-based builder/developer, and before going to Ajax he was with a Toronto-based planning consulting firm. Brian has been an active member of the Ontario Professional Planners Institute and is currently a vice chair with the Regional Planning Commissioners of Ontario.

As Chief Planner for the City of Toronto, Gregg is committed to leading the City Planning Division and making Toronto more liveable, inclusive and adapted for all people. His priorities include meaningfully responding to the housing affordability challenge, growing the transit network across the entire City, proactively planning complete and well-designed communities to support population and employment growth, integrating climate adaption and modernizing planning services. In his over 37 years in municipal planning across the breadth of the City, Gregg has lead great multidisciplinary teams achieving housing policy transformation, neighbourhood scale redevelopment, new planning frameworks and transit facilities, high profile redevelopment projects, heritage planning and public realm redesign. Gregg believes planning is about imagining the city you aspire it to be for everyone and then setting out to help nurture and create it so that it becomes a better, more equitable place for future generations.

Matti Siemiatycki is Director of the Infrastructure Institute and Professor of Geography and Planning at the University of Toronto. His work focuses on delivering large-scale infrastructure projects, regional planning, social purpose real estate, and the effective integration of infrastructure into the fabric of cities. Matti consults widely and is a frequent media commentator on infrastructure and city planning.

Dr. Enid Slack is the Director of the Institute on Municipal Finance and Governance (IMFG) at the School of Cities at the University of Toronto. IMFG focuses on the fiscal health and governance challenges facing cities and city-regions in Canada and around the world. Enid has been working on municipal finance and governance issues for 40 years and consults with governments and international agencies such as the World Bank, IMF, UN Habitat, Asian Development Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the International Growth Centre (at Oxford and LSE). Enid has written several books and articles on property taxes, intergovernmental transfers, and municipal infrastructure finance. Recent co-edited books include Financing Infrastructure: Who Should Pay? and Is Your City Healthy? Measuring Urban Fiscal Health. In 2012, Enid was awarded the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal for her work on cities.