ULI - About the Rose Center Staff

Session RecordingsThe Next Best Thing to Being There

Playback Now offers a complete library of recordings from ULI programs. These CDs include ULI Spring and Fall Meetings and are available in multiple media formats. To order, call (800) 241-7785 or visit www.PlaybackULI.com.

Jess Zimbabwe
Executive Director

Jess Zimbabwe was named Executive Director of the Daniel Rose Center for Public Leadership in Land Use in February 2009. The mission of the Daniel Rose Center is to achieve and support excellence in land use decision making. Jess serves as the Rose Center’s first Executive Director.

Before joining ULI, Jess was the Director of the Mayors’ Institute on City Design, a 23-year old program that is run as a partnership of the American Architectural Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the U.S. Conference of Mayors. In that capacity she has worked with over 125 American mayors and cities to help local leaders better understand issues of urban design so that they could advocate for better built environments in their own communities. During her time at the Mayors’ Institute, she also served as Vice President for Programs at the American Architectural Foundation, overseeing that organization’s Great Schools by Design program, which brings design and planning expertise to local appointed and elected school district leaders. Jess also developed the Sustainable Cities Design Academy through its January 2009 pilot event.

Before joining the Mayors’ Institute and American Architectural Foundation in 2006, Jess served as the Community Design Director at Urban Ecology in San Francisco, California, providing pro bono community planning and design assistance to low-income neighborhoods in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her primary project was the design and development of a community cultural center in East Oakland. The position at Urban Ecology was made possible by the Frederick P. Rose Architectural Fellowship. Her previous work experience includes architecture, housing, and community development work in New York and Baltimore.

Jess earned a Master of Architecture and Master of City Planning from UC Berkeley and a B.A. in Architecture from Columbia University. During her graduate work, Jess was awarded Berkeley’s Branner Traveling Fellowship, and visited 27 national capitals, researching public use of space in and around parliament buildings. She also received the Architecture Department’s Graduate Instructor of the Year Award. Jess received a Comparative Domestic Policy Fellowship from the German Marshall Fund, and was a 2004-2005 Fellow of the Women’s Policy Institute of the Women’s Foundation of California. She has served on several non-profit boards and committees, and currently serves as President of the Association for Community Design. She is a licensed architect, certified city planner, and a LEED-Accredited professional.

Gideon Berger
Fellowship Director

Gideon Berger was named Fellowship Director of the Daniel Rose Center for Public Leadership in Land Use in February 2010. Before joining ULI, Gideon was a senior city planner for the City of Denver, where he managed the Living Streets Initiative—an interdisciplinary, multi-sector regional coalition to promote policies that support multimodal transportation, placemaking, economic development, public health and environmental sustainability—as well as community plans for neighborhoods expecting new rail transit stations.

Prior to working for the City of Denver, Gideon was a transit oriented development (TOD) planner for the Denver Regional Transportation District’s (RTD) FasTracks Program, a $7 billion regional rail transit capital project including six new corridors and more than 50 new stations. At RTD, Gideon was responsible for coordinating between private developers, government planners and transit facility designers on TOD; he co-authored the transit agency’s TOD policy and transit access guidelines, and was lead author of its successful application to the Federal Transit Administration’s (FTA) Public Private Partnership Pilot Program (Penta-P).

Gideon has been an adjunct planning professor at the University of Colorado-Denver, and his award-winning master’s thesis “Condos and Cubicles”—an analysis of factors driving residential sales prices in Center City Philadelphia prepared for the Central Philadelphia Development Corporation—was cited in the 2005 Brookings Institution report “Who Lives Downtown.” Gideon’s previous professional experience includes eight years in public affairs communication, serving as editor of the Almanac of American Politics and Greenwire environmental news service, as website producer for The Nature Conservancy, and as a campaign and media aide for the Republican Party.

Gideon earned his Master of City Planning from the University of Pennsylvania and a B.A. in Communication from American University. He has published articles on planning in the journal The Next American City, National Journal magazine, The Hill newspaper and Planetizen website, and is a certified planner by the AICP.

Alison Johnson
Program Manager

Alison Johnson has more than ten years of experience working in a corporate financial environment along with corporate foundation and non-profit intermediary exposure. Through this course of time, Alison has put in to practice her experience and knowledge of financial management to the operations of mission related grant making.

Working successfully with internal and external partners at philanthropic and intermediary organizations, Alison has coordinated projects that capture regular and comprehensive information – both programmatic and financial - on the use of donor resources. Recently, Alison served as Government Compliance Manager at ULI- the Urban Land Institute. As Manager, Alison contributed to ULI’s capacity, financial analysis, and program planning/reporting associated with a grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to provide Technical Assistance (TA) to assist jurisdictions receiving funding from a new federal stimulus program – Neighborhood Stabilization Program (NSP).

In addition to grant program management, Alison has volunteered with local community groups in variety of ways. In particular, Alison served as Vice-Chair of Surfrider Foundation NYC, where she organized a public outreach and volunteer campaign promoting local ownership of environmentally conscious coastal management policies and the adoption of prudent beach replenishment projects on the south shore of Long Island, NY. Alison looks forward to incorporating her skills and sensibilities as Program Manager at the Rose Center for Public Leadership in Land Use, where she will focus on education for public officials and other convenings that the Rose Center hosts.

Alison earned a Master of Urban Planning from the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University and a B.A. in Political and Economic Philosophy from Wheeling Jesuit University in Wheeling, WV.