Anthony G. Bigio

Anthony Gad Bigio was born in Italy to a British father and a Turkish mother, both Sephardi Jews with deep family roots in the Ottoman Levant. Brought up in a secular, multi-lingual and cosmopolitan environment, he graduated in Rome as an architect and urban planner and soon embraced international development as his calling. He practiced extensively in Africa and in the Arab world, with a focus on vernacular architecture and social housing, before joining the World Bank in Washington DC, where he served for two decades as a Senior Urban Specialist. He was responsible for urban development investments and policy reforms, and for rehabilitation projects of historic cities, in the Middle East and North Africa, in Asia and in Latin America. He was then a Lead Author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, with a focus on cities, and taught another decade at George Washington University’s Master’s program of Sustainable Urban Planning. His long-standing interest for the history of Sephardi Jews in the Ottoman Levant and of his own family in Turkey has led him to the extensive research and writing resulting in this book. Having worked in twenty-five countries and traveled to another forty, he is currently active as an urban advisor to international agencies, dividing his time between Washington DC and Tuscany.