Robin Abad Ocubillo is a dedicated public servant with a passion for civic innovation in public space design, planning, evaluation, and policy. For over a last decade, Robin has led several of placemaking programs at the City and County of San Francisco during a periods of intensive growth. From 2020-2023, he served a 3-year term as Director of Shared Spaces San Francisco, helping communities leverage the public realm for economic recovery, social and psychological wellbeing. Shared Spaces program builds on Places for People, the first placemaking ordinance of its kind in the country to streamline government processes and lower barriers for communities creating and stewarding public spaces in underutilized streets and lots. He ran the City's parklet program over several iterations, increasing the parklet population from thirty into the hundreds, expanding partnerships to cultural and community institutions, and overseeing the development of an award-winning Parklet Manual. He has also extensively developed research methods and metrics for human-use evaluation of public spaces and is co-author of the Global Public Life Data Protocol. Robin is also producer and curator with the San Francisco Urban Film Festival, bringing communities together around civics and storytelling. He serves on the boards of Illuminate the Arts and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. He has edited an edition of Open Space Magazine at SFMOMA titled ‘Participatory Urbanism,’ which interrogated the promise and problematics of public space; asking who participates — and how — in constructing urban places.
In June 2023, Robin joined the City Administrator's office of Oakland, across the Bay from San Francisco, in a newly created role centering by citywide equity and neighborhood resiliency through civic innovation across departments and agencies.
LinkedIn