Current Bousfield Distinguished Visiting Scholar
Renée Gomes, Professor of Practice
Renée Gomes is a Registered Professional Planner with over twenty years of city-building experience. She has lectured in the University of Toronto’s Graduate Planning Program for over a decade, and she currently serves as Senior Vice President of Development at DiamondCorp, leading a team focused on the delivery of innovative, high-quality, urban communities.
Renée’s career includes developing regeneration frameworks for cities in England’s North West, and serving as Director of Development at Waterfront Toronto, where she played a key role in establishing inclusive, mixed-use communities in the West Don Lands and East Bayfront districts. She championed a range of initiatives to secure private-sector investment and ensure master plan implementation in accordance with Waterfront Toronto's mandate of sustainable, comprehensive, waterfront revitalization. Since 2016, she has led numerous large, private-sector-led, development initiatives in GTA, including establishing frameworks for the delivery of over 10 million square feet of mixed-use development and associated community benefits.
Renée is a past Board Director of Evergreen, a national non-profit, and most recently she acted as Chair of Mission Advancement for the Urban Land Institute’s Toronto District Council. Her leadership in city-building initiatives across all sectors has strengthened her commitment to establishing commercially successful real estate projects that advance public policy objectives, including transit-oriented development, affordable housing, and design excellence. Through the Bousfield Distinguished Visitorship in Planning, she will explore the potential of collaboration between the public, private, and non-profit sectors to advance urban solutions in the context of a rapidly changing legislative framework, fiscal constraints, and a national housing crisis.
Rafael Pereira, Professor of Practice
Rafael Pereira is a senior researcher and policy analyst in the Brazilian federal government at the Institute for Applied Economic Research (Ipea), where he leads the Data Science team. His research looks broadly at how urban and transport policies shape the spatial organization of cities, human mobility patterns as well as their impacts on social and health inequalities. Some of his contributions to the fields of urban analytics and planning involve the development of new open-source computational tools and methods to the study of urban systems and transportation networks. These contributions emerge from substantive interests around transportation justice and sustainability issues in urban development. His current work looks at the equity impacts of urban and transport planning on access to opportunities, and at the impacts of the built environment and mobility patterns on environmental emissions. He is particularly interested in how access to opportunities and public services shape socio-economic and health outcomes, with long-term effects on social mobility. Rafael Pereira has a background in sociology and demography and obtained his PhD in Geography from the Transport Studies Unit (TSU) at Oxford University. He has published over 50 peer-reviewed papers, three books and a dozen computational packages in R and Python that are used by several researchers and practitioners in the fields of urban and transport planning.
Joshua Barndt, Professor of Practice