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, including leadership positions in the public and private sectors. Her career includes developing regeneration frameworks for cities in England’s North West, and playing a key role in establishing inclusive, mixed-use communities in Toronto’s West Don Lands and East Bayfront districts. She has championed a range of initiatives to secure private-sector investment and advance master plan implementation across Toronto’s waterfront, and she has led numerous complex development initiatives in Greater Toronto Area, 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 the former Chair of Mission Advancement for the Urban Land Institute’s Toronto District Council. She has been a lecturer in the University of Toronto’s Program in Planning for over ten years. Her involvement in city-building initiatives across all sectors has broadened her perspective and strengthened her commitment to establishing commercially successful real estate projects that achieve public policy objectives.
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