David is an architect and urban designer with over thirty years of experience. He focuses on large-scale planning and urban design projects, and has been involved in hundreds of projects over the past thirty years, encompassing all scales of development from individual buildings to national scale projects across the globe. In general, his work focuses on issues of broadly sustainable planning and development in urban areas and the design and metrics that facilitate their success.

Among other awards, he has received the AIA (American Institute of Architects) Atlanta Silver Medal in 2003 and the AIA Georgia Bronze Medal in 2008. He was also a member of Georgia Tech College of Architecture Faculty from 1992-2013, and the UNC Charlotte faculty in 2021 and 2022. He Is a registered architect, with a Bachelor of Science in Architecture and Master of Architecture from the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Recent project experience includes the National Masterplan for Kuwait, Wells Fargo Uptown Charlotte Masterplan, Wake Forest Innovation Quarter 2, Cambridge Science Park (UK), City of Makkah Concept Masterplan, UCity (Philadelphia) Masterplan, Trinity College Dublin Innovation District, Istanbul Grand Airport City, Milton Park (Oxfordshire UK) Masterplan. His current work is on the station area planning for California High Speed Rail and South Hills (Cary, NC) Redevelopment Masterplan, among others.

Mike is an internationally recognized planner, writer, speaker, and advocate for livable cities. NPR, The New York Times, The Guardian, ABC News, Bloomberg Cities, Salon, Next City, Wired, and Monocle have featured his work, among many other publications. Having delivered more than 250 keynotes, workshops, trainings, and lectures since 2009, Mike has exerted a global influence on how people think about city transformation. In 2018, Mike was named by Planetizen as one of the top 100 most influential urbanists of all-time.

Mike is the creator of the The Open Streets Project and the globally acclaimed Tactical Urbanism: Short-Term Action, Long-Term Change Vol. 1 – 5. With Tony Garcia, Mike is the recipient of the 2017 Seaside Prize and co-author of Tactical Urbanism (Island Press, 2015), named by Planetizen as one of the top planning books of the past decade. Mike collaborated with Andres Duany and Jeff Speck in writing The Smart Growth Manual (McGraw-Hill, 2009).

A founding member of the New England Chapter of the Congress for the New Urbanism, a Board Member for CNU New York, and a steering committee member of the Next Generation of New Urbanists, he remains active in both local and national planning, design, and smart growth advocacy issues. He lectures frequently and leads workshops and trainings on the topics of smart growth, tactical urbanism, public space, and complete streets/active transportation. Before launching the firm in 2009, Mike worked for Smart Growth Vermont, the Massachusetts Bicycle Coalition, and Ann Arbor’s GetDowntown Program. From 2006 – 2009 Lydon worked for DPZ CoDesign, an international leader in the practice of smart growth planning, design, and research techniques.

Our goal is to design places that make a positive difference in the world. That’s why people are at the heart of everything we do.