Ayssar Arida is a practicing "urbatect," writer, educator, and entrepreneur. His award-winning work ranges from digital interface design to large-scale city planning and strategy. He is the advisor to multiple international organizations in culture, education, urbanism, and design. Ayssar wrote the influential book Quantum City, which looks at the city as a field of interaction between physical, emotional, natural, and digital events bridged by individual memories and collective consciousness.

As one of the group Manuel Castells calls “some of the brightest urban minds of today,” Ayssar co-authored New Urbanism and Beyond: Designing Cities for the Future. He launched Urbatecture, the first urban design thinking agency, in Beirut in 2013, after 13 years running Q-DAR development | architecture | research in London and Paris. Ayssar holds an MA in urban design with distinction from Oxford Brookes University, and a Bachelor of Architecture from the American University of Beirut.