Carnegie Mellon University

Chief Executive, The Prince's Foundation for the Built Environment, London, England

Bio

Hank Dittmar became Chief Executive of The Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment in January 2005. Mr. Dittmar is also Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Congress for the New Urbanism, an international membership organization that promotes the creation and restoration of compact, walkable, mixed-use cities, towns, and neighborhoods. Mr. Dittmar has over twenty years of progressively responsible international experience in urban design and development and urban and transport policy.

Prior to assuming the post with The Prince’s Foundation, Mr. Dittmar co-founded and was President & CEO of Reconnecting America,  a nonprofit group that strives to link American cities and regions through high speed rail and bus lines. The group grew out of The Great American Station Founda­tion, which Mr. Dittmar also directed, whose goal was to renovate and revive old train stations in order to stimulate public transit and compact, transit-oriented development.  Mr. Dittmar is a past President of the Center for Transit-Oriented Design and past Director of the Washington-based Surface Trans­portation Policy Project, one of the nation’s leading advocates for transit policy reform.

Mr. Dittmar was appointed by President William Jefferson Clinton to the White House Advisory Committee on Transportation and Greenhouse Gas Emissions and the President’s Council on Sustainable Development’s Metropolitan Working Group, for which he served as Chair. His articles have been published in numerous journals and he is co-editor of New Transit Town: Best Practices In Transit-Oriented Development (2003).