Shoko Sakuma

Shoko is an urban planner, development practitioner and researcher with interdisciplinary experience across civil society and public and private sectors. Her work focuses on community development and integrating co-creation approaches to address urban challenges such as collective housing, urban safety, and community-led heat mitigation. Before joining the Associate Programme, she contributed to various types of area development and stakeholder consultations, including the regeneration of Shibuya district in Japan. 

Her past research centres on displacement, housing, and urban planning. She led the development of a digital platform for Yangon Stories, a research project to support actions to prevent displacement. Her main interest is democratising the planning process by mainstreaming diverse voices and promoting co-creation.

London Borough of Havering

Shoko was matched with the role of Senior Infrastructure Planning Officer at the London Borough of Havering. Shoko was a senior infrastructure planning officer at the infrastructure planning team at the Borough of Havering. The team had four members and sat within the Planning Service but worked corporately across the whole Council, as well as with external stakeholders to ensure the appropriate funding, delivery, governance, and monitoring of infrastructure projects.

Her main roles included drafting an Infrastructure Delivery Plan, developing an infrastructure monitoring dashboard, co-drafting the S106 Supplementary Planning Document and Infrastructure Funding Statement, co-hosting monthly Infrastructure Steering Committee Meetings, and coordinating with GLA. Additionally, there were ad-hoc roles to support other teams, such as site capacity assessment and planning data integration. Her overall impressions of this role were that it required lots of coordination, and these often took up the space for strategic planning.