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Thirty years ago, Sascha found his real passion when he visited Soweto, a township in South Africa, as an architecture student shortly after Nelson Mandela was elected president: to help enable the collective effort of people, community organizations, businesses, and governments to achieve real change.
Architecture, he soon realized, was not the tool for change he envisioned. But the skills of planning, designing and problem-solving with communities proved invaluable as he set out to find out how best to enable this collaboration. And so, he became a serial social entrepreneur, building organizations to help cities become more collaborative in meeting their challenges, and creating better futures.
His work alongside governments and universities to develop innovation districts and living laboratories in the early 2000s led him to uncover a deeper problem, holding back real change. City procurement, the $6 trillion a year business that has a big impact on the quality of public services that shape the world around us: education, social care, transport, climate, safety, economic opportunity. Despite its size, public procurement was never intended to surface and reward the most meaningful solutions. Instead, it replicated old patterns and behaviors that held back progress on tackling our most urgent challenges.
In 2008, Sascha and his team began to apply the workings of architecture design competitions to public procurement more broadly, going on to found Citymart, an organization that by 2020 had helped 135 global cities adopt this new method and was replicated by countless organizations. Over the course of a decade, Sascha had been the leading advocate to reimagine what was considered a stale bureaucratic function into a creative public service.
Sascha’s experience in Soweto, as well as countless other engagements in over 150 cities around the world, didn’t just spark his entrepreneurial journey. Having grown up in a firmly Fast Lane environment in Germany, working in these places and alongside their social innovators, he encountered an alternative. That alternative grew in urgency, as he began to experience the limitations of his own Fast Lane leadership as a social entrepreneur, and a parent. A Fellowship at New America in 2020-21 helped him connect the dots with clarity, laying the foundation for his book, The Slow Lane: Why Quick Fixes Fail And How To Achieve Real Change. In late 2021, Sascha joined Ashoka Innovators for the Public, a global NGO where he helps make Ashoka’s vision of creating an “Everyone a Changemaker” world a reality.
Along the way, Sascha has taken his message around the world by lecturing at universities like the London School of Economics, and the University of Chicago; by being a trusted adviser to philanthropies and think tanks, like the Rockefeller Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, and The Aspen Institute; and by advising governments and public institutions like The Government of South Africa, The World Bank Group, and the Nordic Council of Ministers. His work has been profiled by global media, including the New York Times. In 2011, he was awarded the prestigious Ashoka Fellowship.
Sascha has two daughters and lives in Berlin with his wife Julia. You can visit his website at slowlane.us.
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