Rachel MacCleery is senior vice president at the Urban Land Institute, where she leads the organization’s Building Healthy Places Initiative as well as its Infrastructure Initiative.

Under the Building Healthy Places Initiative, MacCleery is spearheading ULI’s efforts to leverage the power of its global networks to shape projects and places in ways that improve the health of people and communities. The initiative seeks to advance understanding of and action on connections between the built environment and health. Recent Building Healthy Places Initiative reports spearheaded by Rachel include the Building Healthy Places Toolkit and America in 2015. The ULI Healthy Corridors project, also led by Rachel, is working to transform underperforming urban and suburban arterials as healthier places.

Rachel is a dynamic leader with extensive knowledge of land use, environment and sustainability, social equity, and infrastructure policy and practice issues. She has a deep and demonstrated commitment to improving the places where Americans live, work, and play. Rachel has worked at the global, national, and local scales, and has a mix of work experiences which span U.S. and international contexts. She brings a strong understanding of both public and private sector perspectives to discussions about how to make communities better.

Rachel has both local and international experience, and has served on the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Infrastructure. Rachel began her career as a transportation planner for the city of Washington, D.C., where she worked from 2001 to 2004. She consulted on infrastructure and planning projects in China while working for global infrastructure provider AECOM from 2004 to 2008.

Rachel speaks Mandarin Chinese and has lived off and on in China since 1994. She lives with her husband and two daughters in Washington, DC.

Media

Conflict brews over ‘urban’ development in Sugar Land, Houston Chronicle, October 1, 2015