Saskia Beer

Saskia Beer is a Dutch entrepreneur and founder of ZO!City (formerly known as Glamourmanifest) and TransformCity®. She was trained as an architect and worked for renowned Dutch and Japanese offices. In 2009 she lost her job due to the crisis and decided to thoroughly redefine her role by unsolicitedly initiating local projects for making the city more attractive, inclusive and resilient.

In 2010 Saskia Beer unsolicitedly adopted Amstel3, a 250 ha office district in Amsterdam with a 30% vacancy rate. After the municipality had to withdraw from their top-down redevelopment plans, her initiative Glamourmanifest built a multi-stakeholder network and support base around the area transformation. The size and impact of the project evolved incrementally and since May 2016 it forms the test bed for the smart participatory urban planning dashboard TransformCity®.

TransformCity® won the second prize (civic engagement) in Le Monde International Smart Cities Innovation Awards 2016. It was winner in the ‘call for solutions’ in the World Smart City Exp and the first use case in the Citizen City Action Cluster of European Innovation Partnership on Smart Cities and Communities (EIP-SCC). As a leading urban pioneer, Saskia Beer gives regular talks to both students and professionals and is actively involved in the international discourse about new strategies and technologies for urban planning. She lectured at various universities and attended several urban award juries.