Building the Future Through Circular Data: Using Data to Accelerate Towards a Climate Positive and Resilient Urban Design

You are cordially invited to attend the research seminar by Anna Kerr:

Date: 31 Oct 2025
Time: 9:30 AM – 10:30 AM
Venue: SDE3 Level 4, LT427

Building the Future Through Circular Data: Using Data to Accelerate Towards a Climate Positive and Resilient Urban Design

The next frontier of sustainable urban design is the capacity to translate complex data into spatial intelligence. This seminar explores how data-informed design and circular urbanism can be applied to create regenerative, resilient, and inclusive urban environments. Drawing on case studies from Scandinavia, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, it presents a framework for understanding cities as interconnected systems where the flows of energy, water, materials, and mobility are mapped and optimized through data-driven design.

Building on recent research and practice-based innovation from Scandinavia, including the Carbon Cost Compass (C3), Sustainability Sun, and Urban Symbiosis Toolkit, the seminar demonstrates how digital tools can reveal the hidden value of circular resources and carbon data across scales. By integrating systems thinking with digital fluency, it outlines how data-informed, circular design can cultivate a new generation of architects capable of leading measurable, regenerative transformation across ecological, economic, and social systems.

Anna Kerr is an Architect and urban strategist with over two decades of international experience across Europe and Asia. Educated at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture in Copenhagen, Denmark, she integrates professional practice, research, and teaching in sustainable urbanism and systems design. She has held key positions in global architect practices, delivering large scale sustainable and equitable urban design projects around the globe.

Her work is rooted in the Scandinavian tradition of integrated sustainable development, drawing on the SymbioCity framework and the Hammarby model, which unite ecological, social, and economic dimensions into a coherent urban system. She led the Wuxi Eco City masterplan in China winner of the MIPIM Future Award (2011), which translated the Hammarby principles into an Asian context, integrating circular water, energy, and waste systems within a rapidly urbanizing environment.

Kerr established her own practice after winning 1st Prize in the international competition for the Seoul Performing Arts Center in 2009, which marked the beginning of her long-term engagement with sustainable urbanism in Asia. She has lectured internationally at COP, C40 Climate Summit, MIPIM, Rotterdam Urban Summit, World Mayor Forum, and the World Architectural Festival to name a few, and she is frequently invited as jury at international architect competitions.

Her teaching philosophy is founded on the conviction that sustainable design must be understood as an integrated systems process, where ecological, social, and economic dimensions intersect. At NUS ISD she has contributed as part time lecturer to curriculum design, design studios, and graduate mentorship, equipping students to work across all scales and disciplines to address climate resilience, resource scarcity, and urban livability.