Amanda Jay Mortimer Burden (née Mortimer; born January 18, 1944) is an American businesswoman who is a principal at Bloomberg Associates, an international consulting service founded by Michael Bloomberg as a philanthropic venture to help city governments improve the quality of life of their citizens.

[1] Burden is the daughter of socialite Babe Paley and her first husband, Stanley G. Mortimer Jr. (1913–1999), an heir to the Standard Oil fortune.

[2] She is a descendant of the first chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, John Jay, and a granddaughter of Dr. Harvey Cushing, the "Father of American Neurosurgery" and Pulitzer Prize winning author.

In 1947, her mother married William S. Paley, the son of a successful immigrant cigar entrepreneur who built a family acquisition into CBS.

She later earned a Master of Urban Planning from Columbia University, writing an award-winning thesis about solid-waste management.

[9] The Bloomberg administration also launched a "comprehensive waterfront plan known as Vision 2020", which would increase access to the water for kayakers and canoeists and address climate change.

But today's big projects must have a human scale; must be designed, from idea to construction, to fit into the city.

Burden herself characterized the administration as "unabashedly pro-development", and said, "What I have tried to do, and think I have done, is create value for these developers, every single day of my term.

"[9] She emphasized public features like "open space, continuous shop fronts, and the inclusion of trees and other elements that foster lively street life.

The Regional Plan Association argued Burden's control over the aesthetics of development led to "profoundly conservative building" and a "local zeitgeist [that] has switched from big and bold to keeping everything small, nondescript and similar to everything else in the neighborhood.

Burden herself acknowledged the failure to address livability when speaking in 2013 at a CityLab panel on urban expansion: What we haven't figured out is the question of gentrification.

Burden an Honorary Doctorate in Public Administration and the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects presented her with its 2005 Center for Architecture Award.

Burden announced that she will donate the J.C. Nichols prize money to ULI to create a yearly award honoring transformative and exciting public spaces around the world.

Previous recipients include Rick Lowe, Charleston, South Carolina mayor Joseph P. Riley Jr., the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA), the Pritzker Family, Save America's Treasures, Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), and former Miami mayor Manuel A. Diaz.

Their son, Shirley Carter Burden III, is the founder of the managed web hosting provider Logicworks.