Kathryn Firth, Director, Arup
Kathryn Firth is a Director in Cities, Planning and Design at Arup. She is an architect and urban designer whose passion for creating thriving urban places spans some 30 years, working in cities around the world with diverse spatial, social and economic contexts.
Prior to joining Arup, Kathryn was Urban Design Director at several practices in the UK and the US. She was the Chief of Design at the London Legacy Development Corporation, where she directed teams of architects, landscape architects, planners, and engineers to realise the Olympic Legacy. She has led masterplanning and urban regeneration projects across the UK, the US, Europe and the Middle East. These have ranged from public realm improvements to brownfield site development of several thousand hectares.
Kathryn is committed to a productive exchange between the practice of urban design and academic research and is a proponent of a multi-disciplinary approach that ensures collaboration across design, development and socio-economic disciplines. She has ongoing involvement in topical research including social and environmental resiliency in town centres, investigations into typologies and morphologies that support land use intensification in urban and suburban contexts and the intersection of healthcare and urbanism.
Kathryn serves on several design review panels and is a Mayor’s Design Advocate. She holds a Masters of Architecture in Urban Design at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, where she has been teaching over the past 5 years. She also teaches regularly at the Bartlett, UCL.