Rogier van den Berg is Global Director for WRI Ross Center for Sustainable Cities, leading WRI’s program focused on more accessible, equitable, healthy and resilient cities.

Rogier is an urban planning and development expert, an architect and academic with more than two decades of experience. He served as Acting Global Director from 2021 to 2022, working with a transition team of senior directors to coordinate and guide key decisions for the WRI Ross Center. He joined as Director for Urban Development in January 2020, focusing on global programming for urban land use, climate change adaptation, equitable development, urban data analytics and more.

Previously, he led UN-Habitat’s Urban Lab program, which he set up in 2014. It was created to respond to urban planning demand in cities, and rapidly expanded its scope to become a multidisciplinary urban project and integrated planning facility working in 80 cities globally. Van den Berg led global teams working at the intersection of infrastructure, urban planning, urban resilience, climate change adaptation, technology, recovery and reconstruction, and public space. He has established and implemented development projects and programs together with cities and partners in Europe, Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, the Middle East and Asia. He was also a founding partner of the architecture and urban planning firm Zandbelt&vandenBerg and served as head of the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture’s Master of Urbanism program.

Van den Berg holds an Executive Master’s Degree in International Negotiation and Policymaking from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies and a Master of Science in Architecture from Delft University of Technology.

Van den Berg lives in Rotterdam with his wife, two sons and daughter.