Anna Hill, City of Dublin

Meet Anna Hill – Nominated by River Cycleway Europe

Pioneering new approaches to urban mobility

Born and raised in London, Anna’s career has spanned art, design, engineering, innovation, entrepreneurship and systems thinking.  

Anna became a Resident Artist at the Irish Museum of Modern Art before founding Space Synapse at the Digital Hub in Dublin, Ireland. She later worked in the international space industry, incubating at the European Business Incubator, based at ESTEC, Noordwijk in the Netherlands. 

Anna’s company is now based at the PorterShed in Galway in the west of Ireland innovation district. She is the Founder and CEO of River Cycleway Europe (RCE), FLOATWAY LIMITED- a design innovation company developing climate-resilient, modular floating infrastructure for urban waterways. 

Designing infrastructure for a changing climate

Anna leads across the full spectrum of her company as founder, from strategy, stakeholder engagement, product and service innovation and R&D to grant writing, communications, sales and taking a design-thinking approach to citizen engagement with end users, including emergency services and inclusivity advocates. 

The modular system aims to create safe, car-free active travel routes while addressing the interconnected challenges of decarbonisation, public health and climate resilience. The system integrates clean, localised energy generation, applies circular economy design principles and is designed to rise with floodwaters providing resilient carbon neutral infrastructure. 

RCE, in a strategic partnership with Bluet Floating Solutions, is advancing scalable modular cycleway infrastructure across Ireland and Europe.  

From space science to urban mobility

One initiative Anna is particularly proud of is the Earth Rider program, developed in collaboration with astronauts, environmental scientists and the European Space Agency. 

Earth Rider translated the “Overview Effect”, the profound environmental awareness astronauts can experience when viewing Earth from space, into environmental education for young people and communities utilising citizen science and experiential learning. 

For Anna, the program demonstrated the value of working across the boundaries of space science, art, design, innovation, architecture and civic engagement, whilst laying important intellectual and relational groundwork for the systems engineering approach that now underpins River Cycleway Europe. 

Reimagining how people move and live

For Anna, car and motorised vehicle dependency as well as reliance on oil remain defining mobility and clean energy challenges for European cities. She sees these connected to three wider crises: a public health emergency through air pollution, physical inactivity and road danger; an environmental crisis through carbon emissions, urban heat and flood risk; and a social equity crisis through unequal access to safe and affordable active travel and other ‘future proofed’ urban services. 

For waterside cities such as Galway, Cork and Dublin, rising sea levels make the challenge even more urgent. Anna believes conventional infrastructure was designed for a stable climate that no longer exists, creating a need for new green mobility and clean energy solutions suited to dynamic, flood-prone urban environments. 

Why the Emerging Leaders program?

Anna joined the Emerging Leaders program at a pivotal point in RCE’s development: at the inflection point between innovation and scaled impact. With a validated proposition, an active strategic partnership and a live pilot in development, Anna sees the program as an opportunity to develop the relationships, perspectives and leadership capabilities needed for the next stage of growth. 

She is particularly interested in learning how mobility leaders across the public and private sectors navigate the political, financial and operational barriers to systemic change, as well as how public-private partnerships can be structured to de-risk and accelerate new mobility approaches and investment. 

Building connections for greater impact

For Anna, the value of Emerging Leaders lies in what she can learn and in what she can contribute. She hopes to share River Cycleway Europe’s experience of navigating systemic, political and financial barriers, while encouraging fellow participants to think expansively about what urban mobility and the green transition can become. Anna welcomes conversations with mission-aligned investors and partners keen to help scale climate-resilient mobility infrastructure across Europe.