Professor Mark Tewdwr-Jones is Director of Newcastle City Futures and the fifth holder of Newcastle University's 1946 Established Chair of Town Planning and a member of the Global Urban Research Unit at the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape. 

Among Mark's achievements over the last 25 years are aspects of devising foresight methods for the future of places and cities, visual methods for active citizen and business participation in cities, strategic spatial thinking and spatial governance, the study and representation of cities historically in film and television, behavioural dimensions to planning theory, and the relationship between planning and other policy fields such as housing. He currently leads the Newcastle City Futures RCUK Innovate UK Urban Living Partnership pilot for Newcastle and Gateshead, one of five national pilots. 

He was previously Government Advisor on planning, land use and housing issues to ministers in UK Government, the Welsh Government and Scottish Government, and served as a lead expert for the Government Chief Scientist Sir John Beddington’s Foresight project on Land Use Futures; more recently he has been involved in Sir Mark Walport's Future of Cities Foresight project. He directs Newcastle City Futures (NCF), and chairs the City Futures Development Group. NCF designs innovative cross sectoral and collaborative initiatives in the North East to improve research, resilience, wellbeing and policy.