The Creators.

Resident · 2027

Gunjan Gupta

Design, craft, material culture · New Delhi, India

Designer and material thinker, founder of Wrap and Ikkis. She builds furniture and objects that treat street culture and craft lineages as serious material, working with brass casters, cane weavers and stone carvers as collaborators. She carries into Dhun a practice built on what design owes to the ground it comes from.

Anchor · 2026

Helen Marriage

Producer, public realm · United Kingdom

Three decades of ambitious public art: a sultan's elephant moving through London, Lumiere lighting Durham, Processions marking a century of suffrage. Her practice insists that a city's public realm is not a backdrop but a stage, and that ordinary people, gathered, are its protagonists.

Curator · 2026

Curator, 2027 and 2028 chapters

Anupam Yog

Creative strategy, urban innovation · Singapore

A creative strategist working where experience design meets urban innovation, with research on placemaking for healthy habitats. Trained in sustainable urban development at Oxford and as a Hindustani classical vocalist. He curated and produced the inaugural week and its framing, in tension to intention.

Creator · 2026

Founder of Dhun, the ground of the 2027 chapter

Manvendra Singh Shekhawat

Habitat, hospitality, ecology · Rajasthan, India

Founder of Dhun, a 500-acre living laboratory where barren land now holds 300,000 trees, restored water systems and the early shape of a human-scale neighbourhood for some 8,500 people. His wider practice treats heritage, hospitality and ecology as one continuous craft.

Creator · 2026

Digvijay Singh Kathiwada

Long-horizon stewardship · Madhya Pradesh, India

Custodian of 149 villages across 700 sq km in the Vindhya hills, working in quiet, long-horizon ways across rural planning, education, healthcare, sport and cultural heritage. He builds self-reliant communities from the inside out, on a timescale measured in generations rather than terms of office.

Creator · 2026

Carla & Viola Bartoli

Cultural regeneration · Sicily, Italy

A second generation of cultural regenerators carrying forward the reanimation of abandoned Sicilian towns through art, architecture and community. They work with residents, returning families and visiting artists at once, treating culture as civic infrastructure rather than decoration.

Creator · 2026

Elinor Seath

Experience Improvement District · United Kingdom

An architect of the XID framework, which reimagines neighbourhoods as net producers of human wellbeing. She draws design, neuroscience and lived experience together, holding what a place feels like to move through as seriously as what it looks like in a plan.

Creator · 2026

Clare Inkster

Curiosity, insight, enquiry · United Kingdom

A human curiosity and insight consultant who spent a career sharpening how brands enquire before turning that craft to bigger ground. She treats curiosity as a transformative force and runs live experiments with teams learning to think at the edge of what they know.

Resident · 2026

Charles Landry

The Creative City · United Kingdom

Originator of the Creative City idea. For four decades his thinking has shaped how cities reimagine themselves through culture, imagination and the everyday creative act. The Art of Citymaking takes its name and its framing from his book.

Resident · 2026

Dr. Samantha Hayes

Bioneering · Australia

Works at the meeting point of biology and design, treating living systems as collaborators in how places are made rather than as landscaping added at the end. Her bioneering practice looks at what a city grows as closely as what it builds.

Host · 2026

Patron, The Citymaking Circle

Saurabh Mangla

Craft, material, making · Singapore

Anchor host of the 2026 week. He founded a contemporary karkhana putting artisans, designers and clients on one floor, with around 1,000 families in its ecosystem. He set the register of the week: think global, act local, one foot in the past and one in the future.

Host · 2026

Tulsi Grover

Hospitality and lifestyle design · Singapore

Twenty years of hotels, lounges, F&B destinations and mixed use districts across Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Australia. Founder of a purpose led design consultancy, he treats design as an operating system that shapes behaviour rather than surface.

Host · 2026

Erin Lee

Mindfulness, attention, wellbeing · Singapore

A mindfulness teacher and author who came to practice through burnout and a ten-day silent retreat. She teaches attention as a set of skills, self-regulation, emotional resilience and cognitive flexibility, and brought that register of stillness into the pace of the week.