Head of Urban, Anna Gasco oversees MVRDV’s urban planning projects and development strategies in the Netherlands and globally. She is also Head of Urbanism at the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture, where she leads the chair and develops the educational curriculum. 

Anna is a registered architect and urban designer with over 20 years of international experience in project delivery, know-how of working in multidisciplinary teams and of taking a holistic approach to design. Her expertise ranges from multi-layered area transformations, post-growth cities, innovation districts, developments around urban mobility hubs, urban megaprojects, and strategic master planning. Her international experience has taught her to distinguish the locally valuable from the globally applicable and to translate different perspectives into resilient spatial schemes.  

Committed to cultivating synergies between professional and academic worlds, Anna is a Visiting Faculty at Harvard GSD and was Assistant Professor (Adj.) at the National University of Singapore (NUS). She is the author of the book 'The Airport as Urban Territory (NUS Press, 2024), one of the lead authors of the monograph ‘The Grand Projet’ (nai010, 2019) and of ‘The SIJORI Cross-Border Region’ (ISEAS, 2016). Her work has been exhibited at the Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture in Hong Kong/Shenzhen, the Boston Society of Architects, Aedes Berlin and the Singapore Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA). 

Prior to joining MVRDV, she was Associate at KCAP leading their Singapore and Southeast Asia hub and worked as senior researcher at the multidisciplinary Singapore ETH Future Cities Laboratory (FCL). She holds a PhD in urbanism from the ETH-Zurich, a Master’s degree in Urban Design from the Bartlett Graduate School of Architecture, and a DipArch from ISA St Luc Brussels.