Urban Resilience and Digitalisation 

Jochen Rabe is currently Managing Director at the KWB Competence Center Water Berlin gGmbH. The KWB is a extra-university non-profit research center focussing pressing issues around the water cycle including Smart City, and hydroinformatics research questions.

He held the ECDF-professorship for Urban Resilience and Digitalization from the start of the ECDF in 2016 to 2022. Previously Jochen Rabe worked 20 years as an urban developer with major international and national planning, implementation and research project. In his research Jochen Rabe focusses on the rapid digitalization of cities in the context of resilience. In his research projects he pursues the overarching research question, how digitalization can accelerate or risk sustainable urban development. 

Born in Hamburg, he studied at the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg. In his previous professional positions at the multinational and interdisciplinary consulting and engineering firms BuroHappold and Arup in the UK and Germany in particular, Jochen Rabe devoted himself to the task of developing systemic solutions to complex urban problems on various research and implementation projects. Jochen Rabe advises the Federal Ministry of Housing, Urban Development and Building (BMWSB) as a member of the Smart Cities expert group, the capital City of Berlin as part of the Smart City Advisory Board and presides the advisory board of Tempelhof Projekt GmbH.

Since starting his role at the KWB Jochen continues ECDF research projects and collaboration with ECDF-colleagues, such as the ongoing digital democracy BBBlockchain research project with Prof. Florian Tschorsch and the interdisciplinary IDE3A project with Prof. Andrea Cominola. In June 2022 he started the Berlin Smart City project Data Governance with Prof. Max von Grafenstein for the Berliner Senate Chancellory as part of the BMWSB research programme Modellprojekts Smart City. Jochen Rabe is also heading the Smart Water research project as one of the five Berlin Smart City innovation and research projects. 

Jochen Rabe is delighted to continue his close cooperation with the Einstein Center Digital Future as an ECDF Associate Member and to seek further answers around the pressing question of a sustainable and resilient transformation of our cities.