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Biography
Richard Gilbert
Consultant on Urban Issues, Canada
Richard Gilbert has had a varied career, including working as a high-school teacher in the 1950s, a university professor and researcher in the 1960s and 1970s, a municipal politician in the 1970s and 1980s, and a consultant since the early 1990s.
He now works as an independent urban issues consultant focusing on transport and energy issues, and also on waste management and urban governance, with recent or current clients in North America, Europe, and Asia.
Richard Gilbert has a 1966 PhD in experimental psychology and in the 1960s and 1970s taught psychology at universities in Ireland, Scotland, the U. S., Mexico, and Canada. He was associated with the then Addiction Research Foundation of Ontario as a researcher and writer from 1968-1991. He held registration as a clinical psychologist in Ontario from 1974 to 2001.
He served as a member of the then City of Toronto Planning Board from 1973 to 1976, of the councils of the City of Toronto and Metropolitan Toronto from 1976-1991, as president of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities in 1986-1987, and as Chair and CEO of the Toronto District Heating Corporation from 1982-1989. On retiring as a municipal politician, he became the first president and CEO of the Canadian Urban Institute, and has worked as an independent consultant since 1993.
In the 1990s, he taught graduate courses in planning and urban governance in Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University in Toronto. In 2006, he taught a graduate course in urban governance at Simon Fraser University's downtown Vancouver campus, as part of SFU's Urban Studies program.
His most recent major undertaking is a book, written with Anthony Perl, entitled Transport Revolutions: Moving People and Freight Without Oil, to be published by Earthscan/James & James (London, UK) in December 2007. The book explores how societies with great dependence on the motorized movement of people and goods could survive into an era of severe energy constraints.
Richard Gilbert has a daughter and three sons, aged 34-44, and four grandchildren. He and Rosalind have lived in the same house at the edge of downtown Toronto since 1971. They had emigrated from Aberdeen, Scotland, in the late 1960s. Rosalind, who has taught at Toronto's George Brown College for over 20 years, was born near Edinburgh, Scotland. Richard was born in London, England, in January 1940.