Thomas Ermacora

Thomas Ermacora is a city futurist, impact investor and open innovation thinker working to leverage the tools of the 4th industrial revolution and novel urban strategies to solve some of humanities most pressing problems with a focus on climate adaptation and community wellbeing.

Award winning humanitarian and regeneration architect by background, he has pioneered a number of impact projects and experiments looking to redefine the way cities and neighbourhoods self-organise through participatory processes.

In particular, he founded the tactical urbanism non profit agency Clear Village, the independent cultural incubator Limewharf Studios, the first impact Maker Space Machines Room, and authored the Recoded City: Co-Creating Urban Futures (Routledge 2016). Ermacora has consulted and advised a wide range of cities but also organisations including the G7 on AI, the Xprize as resident futurist, the Clinton Global Initiative helping launch Cities Rise for urban mental health, the World Economic Forum where he sits in the future of human rights council, the European Commission on Blockchain for Good, as well as the LA Cleantech Incubator (LACI) and Unreasonable Group.

He also co-founded a refugee education platform with MIT, a last mile technology incubator at the Vatican, and supports many young disruptive startups such as Square Roots Grow, Apparent Energy, RegenVillages, Inhabitat, WasteFuel, and Moon Express. Ermacora has been featured in numerous publications and has spoken at over 100 venues including TED, Near Future and the UN General Assembly.

Since Covid he has broadened his focus on civilisation level questions by contributing to the largest ever e-hackathon, been the guest curator of the acclaimed London Design Museum exhibition about ‘Moving to Mars’, co-executive produced ‘The Troublemaker’, a documentary about Extinction Rebellion, and takes part in helping launch the Consilience Project which is aiming to change the way the news is shaping our perception of truth.

He is currently writing a new book on the emergence of an open source society that he believes we need to ramp up planetary stewardship.