SPEAKERS

December 5, 2022

As Chief Development Strategist for New York City-based, RD Management, LLC, one of the largest, privately-held real estate companies in the nation, Christopher M. Bowen plays an interesting and diverse role in a wide range of projects involving urban redevelopment. He will tell you that what he loves most and what he’s best at, is “connecting the dots.” To him, the most important dots to connect are people and the most upside to be had is in making it easier for people to connect and share their common knowledge and help enhance each other’s ability to climb the mountain, bringing as many others along as possible – because that mountain is life itself. That philosophy in part, in 2018, helped him create the Uptown identity for the city neighborhood around the University of South Florida. In addition to his role with RD Management, Chris Bowen is Chairman of the Executive Board of Soaring City Innovation Partnership (Soaring City), an urban, arts & sciences tech ecosystem builder and 501c3 charitable foundation he co-founded with former, Hillsborough County Commissioner, Mark Sharpe. Soaring City is the Tampa Innovation Partnership reimagined, which Mr. Sharpe co founded with leaders of USF, Moffitt, AdventHealth, and Busch Gardens over a decade ago.

In late 2017, all of his dot-connecting over a more than 30-year career crossing the nation and developing medical, research, corporate, sports, and urban mixed-use, real estate and business projects of all types, sizes and complexities, led him to Tampa as the lead developer of rithm, as
in algorithm. It’s also an acronym for Research, Innovation, Technology, Habitat, and Medicine, the five elements at the heart of formulating this unique and organic, community experiment. The urban, mixed-use development underway, starting with the focus on the surrounding community first, is transforming a 113-acre, 1.5 million square foot, regional shopping mall property in the northern section of Tampa, Florida’s central business district, with building space capacity of nearly 8 million square feet, into an urban innovation neighborhood, a “creative neighborhood,” adjacent to the 45,000-student, USF campus and the one-of-a-kind, medical research district, anchored and driven by creatives and innovators in engineering tech, digital and
XR development, blockchain and cybersecurity, life sciences, habitat design, and the arts.