Creative, inquisitive, engaged.
Our work spans the fields of urban design, urban planning, and communications, and includes:
Conceptual design of public spaces, parks, and streets
Strategic planning for public and private clients, relating to growth and change, mobility, equity, and sustainability in the urban context
We approach urban design and urban planning from a equitable, social science perspective with an emphasis on the design process and arts-based community collaboration. This is the foundation for our final products, plans, drawings, and designs. We focus on incorporating innovative, pop-up, tactile, and interactive community conversations into our projects. Many of our engagements weave collective art making and tactical urbanism into the urban design process.
Who We Are.
Co-Director, Co-Founder
Amber co-leads the firm with a focus on ‘positive urbanism’ and arts-based, community centered design. She co-directs the team’s urban design and strategic planning projects for public and private clients up and down the west coast. Amber focuses on ‘Big Picture’ vision and tactile community design. She also taught for over a decade at the UCLA Graduate School of Urban Planning.
Co-Director, Co-Founder
Shannon oversees multi-modal plans, complete streets design, master planning, and first / last mile projects, along with the firm’s growing civic technology segment. She also brings a creative approach to our practice, folding in art into our public space design and our community dialogs.
Sofia Gulaid, Senior Designer
Sofia has years of active transportation planning, wayfinding, and urban design experience in Boston and Seattle, before making LA her home. She is also a public artist working across media from mapping to metal sculpture. Before becoming an urban designer, Sofia worked in refugee services in Nairobi. She is informed by art and community responsiveness in her design work.
Krystle Yu, Urban Designer
At HERE, Krystle focuses on urban greening and active transportation planning and design. Krystle is deeply committed to fostering equitable and climate-resilient communities. Beyond the drafting table, Krystle enjoys pottery, dancing, and trying new restaurants and night markets across Los Angeles.
Shiying Wang, Urban Designer
Shiying brings her landscape architecture background to the HERE team. She transforms abstract ideas into tangible, functional, and beautiful urban designs, plans, graphics, and visions at all scales. Shiying comes to HERE via Berkeley.
Our team of twelve includes urban designers, landscape architects, and graphic designers, along with urban planners. We collaborate together in our office in the Arts District in Downtown Los Angeles using design-centered processes, charrettes, ‘shares’, and pin-ups.
An interdisciplinary crew, some of us bring in depth data and tech knowledge, writing scripts, mapping, analyzing and extrapolating complex data sets or designing, building and managing civic technology like apps and interactive websites. Others focus on conceptual design, visioning, hand rendering, 3D computer aided design, and designing collateral and graphics at all scales, from a single street section to large-scale supergraphics, murals, wayfinding, or graphic wraps in urban places.
All of us share a love for creating places and community interactions, pop-ups, and conversations about urban planning and design projects, using an arts-based and tactile approach.
