Professor Samer Bagaeen was elected to Brighton and Hove City Council in May 2019 as Councillor for Hove Park ward. Samer is a Chartered Town Planner, a Fellow of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
He is Founding Professor of Planning & Urban Resilience at the University of Kent in Canterbury, and before that, he worked with 100 Resilient Cities – Pioneered by the Rockefeller Foundation as Associate Director with the City Relationships team where he delivered cross-cutting urban resilience strategies for Amman, Ramallah, Rome and Byblos.
Samer established the urban planning school in Brighton in the UK in 2008 with cross sector and professional body support and before that worked at the universities of Aberdeen and Strathclyde.
Samer was born in Amman, Jordan, where he completed is O-Levels at the Bishop’s School, an Anglican organisation, before moving to Hove in 1988 to sit for his A-Levels at Davies’s College on Cromwell Road where he held a King Hussein of Jordan Scholarship.
In the late 1990s, he served as the training programme and master plan coordinator with the Geneva based NGO, the Welfare Association’s Old City of Jerusalem Reviltalisation Programme. He was based in Jerusalem for two years. He returned to Jordan served as Director of Urban Studies at the National Resources Investment and Development Cooperation with responsibility for master planning former military sites. He went on to write 2 books on social sustainability in gated communities and 1 on the brownfield regeneration of former defence estates.
Samer has served as Trustee of the Town and Country Planning Association, the world’s oldest town planning charity in London, and of Resilience Brokers, a UK-based global impact movement. He had previously served as a Trustee of the Royal Town Planning Institute in London.
He currently sits on the governing body at Cardinal Newman Catholic School in Hove having previously served as a governor for 8 years at St. John the Baptist Catholic School in Kemptown.
Samer says:
“I have represented Hove Park since May 2019 and am looking forward to continue to serve and be of service to my residents. I am a Rotarian and am strongly committed to our mottos, Service Above Self and One Profits Most Who Serves Best. I am grateful to my residents who have supported me as I have served them. As long as I can make a difference to their lives and the services they should (but do not get) from the council, I will continue to serve.
“I am proud of the work we do in the ward, together. This is the ward I have represented for the last four years. I have worked with civic, community and sporting organisations in the ward since 2009. My children go to school in the ward and I am a founding trustee of one of the primary schools in the ward. I have fought for community access to developer contributions in the ward, nearly £1 million, to make a difference to my residents’ lives and livelihoods. I look forward to partnering with more residents to deliver projects this funding will pay for, including refurbishing the Hove Park toilets.
"Loss of family homes under both Labour and Greens is a big issue. As a team, we will fight for families to continue to make this ward their home. We will not let Labour and Greens hollow out this ward by driving out families by demolishing family homes. Labour and Greens have saddled this ward with pavement weeds and root damage, clogged drains, potholes, closed toilets, missed bin collections, and a growing scourge of graffiti. I am working with the new Care Co-op and Citizens to support other projects.”
