Steven Burgess

About Steven

Steven Burgess is the Director of Complete Street and one of Australia's most experienced urban strategists, with more than 30 years of work reshaping how cities design their streets and public spaces. He is the author of Complete Streets – Guidelines to Urban Street Design and a contributor to the NACTO Global Street Design Guide — one of the most widely referenced frameworks in urban design internationally. His project experience spans the Middle East, Central America and across Australia, covering urban corridors that range in scale and complexity from local streetscapes to major city-shaping infrastructure. He has delivered a TEDx talk on his field.

Burgess's central argument is deceptively straightforward: the way we design streets determines the way we live. Streets are not just transport infrastructure — they are the primary public spaces of cities, and their design has direct, measurable consequences for community health, economic activity, safety, and environmental outcomes. That argument has been made before, but rarely by someone who has spent three decades testing it on the ground across four continents.

For urban planning conferences, local government forums, infrastructure and development industry events, and sustainability summits, Steven Burgess brings the specific authority of a practitioner who has spent his career bridging the gap between design theory and built reality. He does not speak in the language of urban utopias. He speaks in the language of problems, decisions and trade-offs — and his audiences, whether they are engineers, planners, councillors or community advocates, leave with a clearer picture of what good street design actually demands of the people responsible for it.