Yvonne Yeung

CEO, SDG Strategies, Vice-chair Urban Land Institute ULI SDRC Product Council. ULI Toronto Advisory Board, WLI Champion, Founder ULI-FIG Getting to Transit-Oriented Communities Initiative, Canada

Yvonne Yeung is the CEO of SDG Strategies, a strategy consulting firm based in Canada with over 20 years of public and private sector experience delivering high-quality, award-winning, sustainable transit-oriented communities and vibrant public spaces worldwide.  Her work focuses on informing how cities can unlock the value of infrastructure to deliver healthy, equitable, 15-min walkable complete communities through synergistic collaboration as a blueprint.

As the former Head of Urban Design at the City of Brampton, Yvonne led the 0.7 million population city to shift from an auto-dependence structure to a ‘City of Transit-oriented Communities.’ Through a ‘City By-Design’ culture, Yvonne pioneered a ‘Living Plan Collaborative Tool’ as a platform for co-design with developers and communities to integrate public interests and design excellence into walkable precincts and to serve as foundations for decisions and change.

Appointed as Vice-chair of the Urban Land Institute SDRC Product Council, member of ULI Toronto Advisory Board and the ULI WLI Women’s Leadership Initiative Champions, Yvonne founded the "Getting to Transit-Oriented Communities Initiative", leading the strategic engagement across the region and North America, promoting progressive city-building practices and collaborations between public and private sectors.  Specialized in team building, executive strategy, large-scale transformation and cross-sector implementation, Yvonne is the recipient of the University of Toronto Rotman School of Management MBA Award, the American Society of Landscape Architects Honour Award, a founding board member of the OALA Ground Editorial and past member of the City of Toronto Public Art Commission, the Canadian Standards Association Design Standards Committee and the Green Building Certification Institute LEED Review Committee.

As an urban designer, planner, landscape architect, and sustainable neighbourhood development accredited professional, Yvonne has developed urban design implementation frameworks for Age-Friendly and Cognitive-Friendly Communities, Urban Mixed-use School Community Hubs, Digital Smart-City Integration, Strategic Partnerships for Community Infrastructure Integration in High-Density Neighbourhoods, Public Realm Strategy and Transit-oriented Communities. Her large-scale redevelopment projects include the Langstaff Gateway Urban Growth Centre, Buttonville Airport Redevelopment, Yonge Street Subway Corridor Redevelopment, Queen Street East BRT Corridor Urban Growth Centre, Hurontario-Steeles LRT Corridor Redevelopment, Downtown Brampton Urban Growth Centre, Uptown Brampton TOC, and other TOCs in UK, US and Asia. Her participatory-design work has been profiled at the Design Exchange and further evolved into an award-winning interdisciplinary tool to unlock the value of TOC through the cross-sector development of precinct plans.



Her projects have won planning and design excellence awards from the Waterfront Centre in Washington DC, the Canadian Institute of Planners, the Canadian Society of Landscape Architects, the International Grands Prix Du Design, the Ontario Professional Planners Institute and the City of Toronto Urban Design. 

Yvonne has served as a speaker at Urban Land Institute, UN-Habitat, Urban Economy Forum, University of Toronto School of Cities, Smart Cities Expo, Green Roof for Healthy Cities, AMCTO Municipal Leadership Forum, Civic Action, Janes Walk, and university design studios at Toronto, Waterloo, Ryerson, Guelph, Oklahoma, and York. Yvonne travels regularly and has recently been to Oslo, Helsinki, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmo to document the emerging trends and innovation in sustainability, technology, transit-oriented system, family-oriented urban living, and land development business models.