Justin Kearnan
Justin Kearnan is a Managing Partner at City Collective and leads an elite team of multidisciplinary design professionals that turn bold ideas into places people adore. His career tenure as an urban designer, architect, city planner, former carpenter, and emerging developer, has afforded him the remarkable opportunity to 1) deliver mixed-income, mixed-use housing for people that need it the most, 2) craft transformative citywide interventions for major metros and traditional small towns, and 3) curate sport and community infrastructure that sparks new and longstanding traditions and memories for families and emerging athletes. All these experiences have provided him with the unique ability to take big visions off the page and into the world.
His extensive experience includes influential roles with some of the world’s foremost urban innovators, such as SOM, Elkus Manfredi, and AECOM. He holds a post-professional degree in Urban Design from the University of California, Berkeley, a Master of Architecture and Bachelor of Science of Architecture from Wentworth Institute of Technology, and has completed studies at South China University of Technology and Hochschule fur Technik und Wirtschaft Berlin.
International Case Study - Modular Housing: The Next Operating System for Cities
The housing crisis isn’t coming. It’s already here. For decades, the cost of housing has exploded while incomes struggle to keep pace — leaving cities trapped in a system that is too slow, too expensive, and too fragmented to deliver the homes people need. We have tried policy tweaks, financing tools, and planning reforms. Yet the gap between what housing costs and what people can afford continues to widen. In this provocative keynote, Jordan Jones (Integral) and Justin Kearnan (City Collective) argue that the real problem isn’t just housing supply — it’s the development model itself. They will unveil a radically different approach: combining off-site modular construction, mixed-income communities, public-private partnerships, and human-centered urban design into a repeatable system capable of delivering housing 20% cheaper, 50% faster, and at true community scale. This isn’t theory. It’s a new operating system for city building. The session will reveal how this model is already being deployed through transformative projects including Tribute Rising, a three-phase 1,000-unit mixed-income district in Durham, NC, USA, and two other developments combining an additional pipeline of 2,000 units. Attendees will also get the first look at a new vertically integrated development platform created to deploy this approach at scale, turning innovation in housing delivery into a powerful new flywheel for housing, community, and opportunity. The message is simple: if we want to solve housing, we must stop building projects and start building systems.
