Baptist Brayé (1953) is an urban planner by training. Shops were the linking pin in his career. He founded Locatus, a database company that invented forecasting tools for retail planning with eery precision. Thanks to his expertise he was appointed visiting scholar at Harvard. He sold his company, left Harvard but never stopped with what he has been doing his whole life, observing people in their urban environment.

Today he is, together with his wife, journalist and writer Tracy Metz, the driving force behind ‘StadsSalon’, a small not-for-profit salon in the center of Amsterdam where they organize cultural encounters on critical issues in a personal setting. It is an incubator for cultural initiatives, it addresses pressing social and cultural topics that are worth discussing and offers a platform for brilliant ideas in the making. In conjunction with that he is developing ‘MiniMecenas’, an initiative in the making for a web enabled ‘one click’ credit card payment solution to optimize fiscal friendly funding of small cultural initiatives in the Netherlands.