Sargent Town Planning is an urban planning consulting firm focused on building sustainable pedestrian- and transit-oriented neighborhoods, districts, corridors, towns and cities. Founded by David Sargent in Ventura, California in 1995 and reestablished in Los Angeles in 2009, the firm provides a full range of urban planning and design services to public and private clients. Mr. Sargent is the firm’s president and managing principal and has been practicing architecture and urban design for 30 years, for the past 20 focusing exclusively on sustainable urbanism.
The firm’s work integrates human-scale, public space networks, multi-modal transportation systems and civic amenities with residential, commercial and mixed-use development to form complete, coherent and walkable communities. Much of the firm's work is based on analysis of America's best towns and cities, and the adaptation of timeless and regionally derived design elements to modern real estate development.
The firm’s design process is typically centered around public workshops and design charrettes in which the client, consultant team, municipal officials, neighbors and stakeholders, and the general public collaborate in the planning and design of the project at hand. Beginning with rigorous analysis of the planning area and its physical, economic and political context, the firm facilitates a sustained public conversation through which a vision for the future of the place is developed iteratively and documented in the form of a clear. well illustrated vision plan supported by technical analysis and implementation strategies.
That vision is then “reverse engineered” into a systematic sequence of implementation actions, standards, guidelines and procedures. These include regulating (zoning) plans, public realm standards for street networks and other public improvements, and form-based development codes that guide the placement, configuration, scale, and use of buildings to ensure a harmonious, locally calibrated, and sustainable environment. Sample building plans, elevations, perspectives and three-dimensional massing models are prepared to illustrate the intentions of the plan, and to demonstrate the feasibility of the regulations and design guidelines. The firm also offers advanced conceptual design of individual buildings, public improvement design and coordination, development design review, and other implementation services to help clients deliver the envisioned quality as development occurs.
For each project, Sargent Town Planning assembles a team of professionals tailored to meet the client’s requirements, including in-house specialists and consulting professionals. Teams typically include architects, planners, landscape architects, civil and transportation engineers, and urban economists, and may include environmental consultants and others as required. For project charrettes, all team members are assembled on the site for a period of up to ten days to collaboratively and efficiently produce and test the design.
The firm’s current and recent projects range in size from neighborhood additions to entire cities, and in scale and character from rural communities and village scale downtowns to transit-oriented development in metropolitan districts and urban corridors. Current projects include downtown revitalization plans, greenfield neighborhoods for town expansion, brownfield infill districts, transit-oriented corridor transformation plans and form-based codes.
The firm is based in a recently restored 1924 office building on Pershing Square in downtown Los Angeles across the street from a Red Line subway station, with branch offices in downtown Berkeley, California and Albuquerque, New Mexico.
