César Castro
Director of Planning & Sustainability · AICP, ENV SP
César is an urban planner and community development executive whose work spans land development regulation, disaster recovery, and public investment. At SwiftGov, he works directly with jurisdictions on applying AI to Land Development Code modernization, planning implementation workflows, and grant alignment.
He served as Chief Policy and Planning Officer for the North Carolina Office of Recovery and Resiliency, where he directed planning and policy for more than $2 billion in federal disaster recovery funding and helped create Back@Home, North Carolina's Balance of State housing stability program. He later served as Director of Sustainability and Resiliency at Vanderbilt University, setting direction for institutional infrastructure projects and aligning long-term physical development with environmental reporting frameworks. Earlier in his career, he worked on resilience and hazard mitigation planning in support of state and local recovery programs.
César holds a Master in Urban Planning and a Master in Design Studies in Risk and Resilience from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He also holds an MFA in Creative Writing from North Carolina State University and bachelor's degrees in English and Spanish from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He is an AICP-certified planner, an Envision Sustainability Professional, and is fluent in Spanish. He speaks on code modernization, resilience, and the use of AI in planning.
