Maker City

Peter Hirshberg serves as an innovation advisor to cities and companies. He has created two centers of urban innovation from scratch: City Innovate Foundation, formed with The San Francisco Mayor’s office, UC Berkeley, and the MIT Media Lab; and Gray Area Foundation for the Arts. He is CEO and founder of the Re:Imagine Group. He is co-author of The Maker City: A Practical Guide To the Reinvention of our Cities.

Mark Muro, a senior fellow at the Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings, leads the program’s advanced and inclusive economy activities. Mark is an expert on regional technology ecosystems and economic development and has published extensively on manufacturing, digital trends, energy issues, and regional industry clusters.

Mary Mattingly is an artist who founded “Swale”, a floating food forest built atop a barge that welcomes visitors to pick fresh food for free in New York City, where it’s currently illegal to forage on public land. Swale comes from a belief that clean water is a human right, and that access to fresh, healthy food should be too.

Alfa is the co-founder and CEO of Rising Tide Capital, a nonprofit that supports under-served entrepreneurs in low-income urban communities to start and grow successful businesses. In 2012, Alfa was recognized as one of Forbes’ Most Powerful Women Changing the World. Born and raised in Ethiopia, Alfa came to the U.S. at age 12 with a keen interest in poverty alleviation and conflict resolution. She graduated cum laude from Harvard University in 2003.