Robin Abad Ocubillo

he/him
Co-Founder,
Global LGBTQI Placemaker Storytelling Project
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Robin Abad Ocubillo is a dedicated public servant with a passion for civic innovation in public space design, planning, evaluation, and policy. From 2020-2023, he served as Director of Shared Spaces San Francisco, the City’s banner public space programs. He shepherded its legislation into a permanent program that continues to help communities leverage the public realm for economic recovery, social and psychological wellbeing. Shared Spaces built upon Places for People, the first placemaking ordinance of its kind in the country for which Robin was the City’s principal planner.

Robin has led several of the City's placemaking programs during a periods of intensive growth; multiplying the parklet population tenfold, expanding partnerships to cultural and community institutions, and overseeing the development of an award-winning Shared Spaces Manual (2023) and Parklet Manual (2015). A scholar of public space innovation in California, Robin has also published numerous public life studies on parklets; starting with inauguration of parklets in Los Angeles (2013) and also in San Francisco (2013-2023). He has extensively developed research methods and metrics for human-use evaluation of public spaces and is co-author of the Global Public Life Data Protocol (SF Planning, Gehl Institute, and City of Seattle, 2018).

Robin is also producer and curator with the San Francisco Urban Film Festival, bringing communities together around civics and storytelling. As a Resident of Film and Civics at the YBCA (2020-2022), he curated “Echo Location: Cultural Geopolitics in the South of Market (2021),” exploring the decades-long synergies between Filipinx and LGBTQ community activism in that neighborhood. He has guest-edited an edition of Open Space Magazine at SFMOMA titled ‘Participatory Urbanism (2021),’ which interrogated the promise and problematics of public space; asking who participates — and how — in constructing urban places. He serves on the boards of Illuminate the Arts and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

Breakout panelist: You’re Welcome