David Dixon

David has built a North America-wide reputation for transforming cities and suburbs into places where people want to live, work, play, gather, and invest. His work focuses on creating “five-minute places”—walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods that connect people to opportunity, strengthen communities, and unlock investment.

A leading advocate for walkable density, David helps communities realize the potential of downtowns and urban districts, transform innovation clusters into globally significant ecosystems, rebuild public housing as mixed-income neighborhoods, and reinvent suburbs around walkable centers. Over the past decade, his work has helped shape more than $10 billion in transformative investment. Signature examples include:

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• Unified Post-Katrina Recovery Plan and Master Plan for New Orleans

• Reinvention of Kendall Square (Cambridge) and Kanata North (Ottawa) as globally recognized innovation ecosystems

• Transformation of Cabrini-Green (Chicago) and Bunker Hill (Boston) public housing into thriving mixed-use, mixed-income neighborhoods

• Creation of walkable mixed-use downtowns in suburban Dublin, Ohio, and Sandy Springs, Georgia

• Reinvigoration of civic spaces through Boston’s Charles River Esplanade Plan and citywide parks and public realm plans for Fort Worth and Miami

David received the American Institute of Architects’ Thomas Jefferson Award for Public Architecture, its highest honor for achievement in the public sphere. Architect Magazine named him to its Hall of Fame, describing him as “the person we call when we have a question about cities.” His work has received dozens of additional national awards from organizations including the AIA, American Planning Association, Congress for the New Urbanism, International Downtown Association, and American Society of Landscape Architects.

David is the author of the forthcoming In Walking Distance: How 5-Minute Neighborhoods Are Reinventing Downtown, co-author of Urban Design for an Urban Century, and co-editor of Suburban Remix. He holds master’s degrees in architecture and urban design from Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania.