Roberta Brandes Gratz, an award-winning journalist and urban critic, international lecturer and author, was voted one of Planetizen’s top 100 urban thinkers in 2011. Her most recent book is We're Still Here Ya Bastards: How the People of New Orleans Rebuilt Their City. She is also author of The Battle For Gotham: New York in the Shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs; The Living City: Thinking Small in a Big Way; and Cities Back from the Edge: New Life for Downtown.

In the 1990s, Ms. Gratz worked with William Moody of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund traveling throughout Central Europe to observe and advise newly formed citizen-based organizations on regeneration strategies. In 2000, she wrote a book-length report for RBF A Frog, A Stream, A Wooden House: Ten Years of Community-based Change in Central Europe.

Ms. Gratz is widely credited for coining the term “Urban Husbandry” and illustrating in her writing how urban regeneration works in actuality, rather than just in theory.

She was appointed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg to the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission in 2003 and left that position in the Fall of 2010 for an appointment to the Mayor’s Sustainability Advisory Committee.

In 2005, in collaboration with Jane Jacobs, Stephen Goldsmith and Margie Zeidler, Ms. Gratz founded the Center for the Living City to build on Ms. Jacobs’ work. This was the culmination of several years of discussion with Ms. Jacobs about building on her legacy.

Ms Gratz recently published a book on the recovery of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, titled We're Still Here Ya Bastards: How the People of New Orleans Rebuilt Their City. Her articles appear online in her Huffington Post blog, Citiwire, and Planetizen.