Skye Duncan joined the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) in 2014 to serve as the Director of the Global Designing Cities Initiative, a multi-year program funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies that is developing a Global Street Design Guide and working with cities on street and public space design around the world. 

Skye is an urban designer with over a decade of experience in architecture, urban design, planning and landscape architecture, and comes to NACTO after seven years working as a Senior Urban Designer at the New York City Department of City Planning in their Office of the Chief Urban Designer. There, she offered her design expertise to help shape sites of all scales across the city and collaborated with multiple agencies and organizations to make New York City a more sustainable, resilient, livable and healthy city. Skye contributed to the NYC DOT Street Design Manual and helped develop much of the Planning Department’s innovative work relating to public health and the built environment. She was a contributing author to the award-winning Active Design Guidelines (2010) and led a team to produce the well-received 2013 publication Shaping the Sidewalk Experience. 

Skye has worked professionally as an International Urban Design Consultant in Brazil, Colombia, Canada and New Zealand, and has been an Associate Professor at Columbia University in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation for the past seven years. She graduated as a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia in the Master of Science in Architecture and Urban Design program and has a Bachelor of Architecture with Honors from Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand.