Career
Clark is author of 10 books and 100 reports on cities, investment and place-leadership. He is co-host of two podcasts, The Century of Cities and The DNA of Cities, and co-founder of the Urban Analytics Group, The Business of Cities. His column, The Planet of Cities, is hosted by RICS, and he is Global Cities expert on the BBC World Service Series, My Perfect City.
He has chaired more than 20 international advisory boards for individual cities that are reformulating their future investment strategies, long term plans, and governance, including Barcelona, New York, Mumbai, Sao Paulo, Bogota, Mexico City, Johannesburg, Cape Town, Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, Barcelona, Vienna, Turin, and Oslo. He has led comparative studies on Chinese, Canadian, Australian, European, North American, Latin American, Middle Eastern, South-East Asian, Caribbean, Nordic, and Indian, Cities.
Globally, Clark’s previous roles include Group Advisor, Future Cities & New Industries at HSBC (2018 -2022), Chair of the OECD Forum of Cities & Regions (1996 – 2016), Global Fellow on Cities at the Brookings Institution (2008-2018) and Global Fellow at the Urban Land Institute (2006 – 2018). He was a Senior Advisor on urban investment at the World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, and the European Investment Bank. Member of the WEF Future Council on Cities & Urbanisation, Bloomberg Coalition on Dynamic Cities, and Senior Advisor to The Bay Awards for urban innovation.
In the UK, he was Lead Advisor on Cities & Regions at the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (2004 to 2010). He has worked extensively with Glasgow, Edinburgh, Cardiff, Belfast, Manchester, the Core Cities, and Scottish Cities Alliance. He was Senior Advisor to the Open Cities Programme (2006), and chair of British BIDs (2010). He is chair of the Connected Places Catapult, and 3Ci. He is Hon Prof at Strathclyde University and teaches regularly at LSE and UCL, and is Prof at UCL and City Universities. He is Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (FAcSS).
In London, he started work on refugee employment and as an inner-city officer at LB Lambeth in 1988 and held leadership roles at The Local Economy Policy Unit (LEPU), The London Docklands Development Corporation, Greater London Enterprise, London Enterprise Agency, and London Development Agency, until 2004. From 2012 onwards he has held non-executive roles including Chair the of London Stansted Cambridge Consortium (now The Innovation Corridor), board member of the London LEP for 10 years, and Transport for London (TfL) for 9 years (2025). At TfL he was Chair of the Investment and Programme Committee and founding Chair of the Land & Property Committee which oversaw the establishment of Places for London, TfL’s property company. He was a member of TfL’s Finance and Elizabeth Line Committees. He is Senior Advisor at NLA, authoring 14 essays for the New London Agenda.
