Bob van der Zande Director Residential Markets Development Corporation City of Amsterdam Amsterdam Bob van der Zande is Director Residential Markets for the City of Amsterdam since 2009. He is responsible for several residential programmes in the city, such as the midsegment rental housing, the self-built housing programme and Student and Youth housing. He works for the city administration as well as strategic advisor for the Metropolitan Region organisation, which includes 16 smaller cities in the surroundings. He was founder of the Development Corporation in 2003 and served as COO until 2009. His commitment with ULI started when he was co-founder of the Urban Investment Network, a European ULI network that tries to improve the cooperation between private investors and city administrations. Co-founders were Barcelona, Istanbul, Edinburgh and Torino from the public side and Allianz, ING, ECE and Corio from the private side. He organised a Summit for the Urban Investment Network in Amsterdam in November 2011, in the midst of a huge real estate crisis. He is a member of the Watertorenberaad, a national council for innovative spatial development and since 2013 member of the board of ULI The Netherlands. Last year he was invited to give his advise and lectures for ULI Ireland, ULI Belgium and ULI Germany. He is visiting lecturer at the University of Amsterdam. He is also responsible for the real estate marketing strategy for Amsterdam, Utrecht, Rotterdam and the Hague (the big four in the Netherlands) at the largest European real estate fair, the Expo Real in Munich. He started the Amsterdam Investors Office Residential a year ago, to improve the market in the region for residential development. The Office receives all kinds of investors big and small, institutional and private to guide them to the locations that match with their investment strategy. It recently created an agenda for a selection of 15 development sites to be put on the market in 2014. He started his work in urban (re)development in the 80’s when parts of Amsterdam where occupied by squatters. People were moving out of the city, suburbanisation was the main strategy. In the west part he worked on urban renewal, together with the 6 Housing Associations (they still posess 50% of all dwellings in Amsterdam which means some 200.000) and inhabitants that lived in poor circumstances. Later on he attributed to the Waterfront Development in the Eastern Docks, the development of the mixed-use area Zuidas and a new strategy for cooperative development on the Zeeburgereiland, a 14 ha area near the City center. He graduated as urban designer at the Delft University of Technology in 1978. (March 2014)

Jacopo della Fontana, holds an MBA in Architecture (Polytechnic of Milan). Setting off from the native education and background of classical architecture he gained working experience in London, Frankfurt and Osaka, before coming back to Italy. He is founder and chairman of the Milan based architectural and consultancy practice D2U - Design to Users, active in the office, retail, mixed-use and leisure sectors. Jacopo has led D2U teams in the design of diverse projects typologies and market sectors, from interiors to architecture, always aiming to develops creative solutions, compatible with the objectives, the financial restrictions and the practices of professional Clients. In addition to practicing, he is regularly contributing to architectural magazines and he is lecturer at Milan Polytechnic University. Besides Italian, he his fluent in English and French and has a good knowledge of German and Spanish. He joined ULI in 2004. He is member of ULI Content Advisory Group, of the ULI Urban Regeneration Council and of the ULI Italian National Council Executive Committee