Tanvi Sharma on Transforming Challenges into Sustainable Solutions

Driven by her curiosity, Tanvi began her career in architecture at Rice University, but her experience helping Houston rebuild after Hurricane Harvey set her on the path to becoming a planner. Today, she enjoys building and maintaining long-term relationships with clients and collaborators that shape the cities she’s lived and worked in. Through a combination of on-the-job learning, mentorship, and academic studies, she has developed a perspective that helps her clients accommodate shifting needs and a changing climate.

Can you tell us a bit about your background? How did you get into planning?

I started my career in architecture, coming to the US in 2009 to study at Rice University. It was a six-year professional degree—five years of schooling plus a year of work experience. Throughout my studies, I was convinced I was going to do architecture, but I was always drawn to the more urban scale of work. 

After graduating, I completed my internship at an architectural firm, but never felt deeply passionate about it. When I started working for one of my professors who ran a small urban planning studio within an architecture firm, I requested to split my time 50/50 between architecture and planning. I wasn’t ready to abandon architecture entirely, but I wanted to maintain my path toward architectural licensure while exploring this new field.

Once I was licensed, I gradually phased out my architectural projects. I had one completed building and had contributed to the early design phases of a few others, but my interests were clearly shifting. The real turning point for me was Hurricane Harvey in Houston. It was a scary moment, but it also led to my firm securing a project with the Greater Houston Flood Mitigation Consortium. This initiative brought together researchers and philanthropic partners to address problems that city and state authorities had struggled with for years. We as a firm were the project manager for this, and it was my job to coordinate, interview, translate, and publish fact sheets and a recommendations report. Working on the project allowed me to learn about all the invisible forces at play that allow you to work towards climate resilience. And it also highlighted for me how little I knew about the built environment beyond a building.

How did that experience impact what you wanted to do next?

I realized there was a significant gap in my knowledge, and this was the type of work I wanted to pursue. So I went back to school—I went to MIT to complete a Master in City Planning. That’s where I met Mary Anne [Ocampo], who introduced me to Sasaki. While I broadened my city planning knowledge at MIT, my thesis was still from a lens of flood mitigation.

After MIT, I moved to San Francisco to work on a flood mitigation project for two years. With the city client, I worked on a thoughtful solution starting from the watershed scale down to a single corridor site design, leaning on technology such as detailed flood mapping and GIS overlays. Ultimately, the project ran into political issues. That was a wake up call, showing how you could have the best design solution out there with the brightest minds on it, and it could still fail because of politics. 

This was a disheartening period in my career. It made me question my path and motivated me to zoom back out rather than remaining so deeply invested in a narrow focus only to face disappointment. Joining Sasaki let me open up the breadth of my work again, instead of being just focused on flood mitigation. I could zoom out and think about the different disciplines at play and how they connect in different contexts and how we can think more holistically about these problems.

What challenges and opportunities do you see working on campuses?

Currently, I spend more than half of my time working on campus projects. What makes these environments so appealing is their forward-looking approach and the significant control they have over their development.

Planning always involves navigating seemingly opposing forces. Often, especially in campus projects, these tensions revolve around growth ambitions versus sustainability goals, quality of life concerns, or other priorities. It can seem like quantity and quality are inherently at odds.

But what I learned from working with principals like Mary Anne and Tyler is that those things are not at odds with each other. There’s an effective way to balance them. Sometimes it’s educating a client on the trade-offs around a decision, sometimes it’s coming up with a creative solution. Finding these solutions is really satisfying.

How has working in Denver shaped your career?

I’ve greatly benefited from how Josh and Anna have positioned Sasaki within Denver’s urban planning landscape. Working with Josh on the Auraria project and the Denver Area Plan has been particularly valuable. Both are central to Denver geographically and politically.

Through these projects, I’ve met a lot of different stakeholders working on connected pieces. There’s been a lot of visioning work around the Speer Corridor, which runs between Auraria campus and downtown. We’ve met a lot of Denver’s key decision makers, including city officials, architects, and planners, who have had a large say in shaping these areas, which has helped me create a growing network here.

Denver feels like a young city to me. Having lived in Houston, Boston, and San Francisco, I find Denver reminds me of Houston maybe 20 years ago, so it’s a really cool place to plug in at this stage in my career, because I feel like there is room for me to contribute to and shape its development and hopefully avoid the legacy challenges of older cities.

Any particular Denver projects you’re excited about?

We just won the Park Hill Park project, in which the City is planning to convert a 155-acre golf course into the fourth largest regional park in Denver. It’s going to be a huge moment in Denver’s urban plan. Being able to engage with stakeholders and community members to repair trust, understand the nuances, and identify the need is critical, and the relationship we’ve established with the city  is a big part of that. I’m excited to work on this project, especially since this is an area I pass by frequently on my way to the train station.

Also, Daniel [Church] and I have also been invited to teach a planning studio on the Denver Area Plan at the CU Denver College of Architecture and Planning. This elective will focus on our current project and will allow us to take our work, which has been constrained by real-world political considerations, into an academic environment where we can explore thought experiments about what downtown and its various nodes could become.

All these opportunities interconnect because Denver is a small enough environment and Sasaki—particularly Josh and Anna—has established itself as a key member in this network. This gives me both a nuanced understanding of the city’s dynamics and meaningful influence over developments here.

What brings you the most satisfaction in your work?

I find the relationships particularly rewarding. With the Auraria project, Tyler was the principal-in-charge, and since he’s based in Boston, I was fortunate to become the primary client-facing team member here in Denver.

It’s because of this face time with the client that I developed an excellent professional relationship. Having both my primary contact and his deputy at Auraria validate our work has been exceptionally satisfying. 

I really enjoy maintaining these relationships and getting repeat work from a client. Our Auraria client asked me to join a design review committee for an upcoming building on the campus. Since I worked on the campus plan and have an architecture background, I’ll review the design proposal at key milestones to make sure they connect back to the master plan. Seeing these ripple effects and continuing to be involved after our initial planning work is tremendously gratifying.

What’s your favorite part of the planning process?

I find the entire planning process exciting because it presents different challenges throughout each phase. But if I had to pick which parts are the most engaging, it would be the initial and final months on a project. 

At Sasaki, we broadly break planning projects down into three phases. It makes sense that, as a planner, I’m drawn to the bookends of this process. In the beginning phase, I love the research and data analysis—seeing the problem, combing through all the issues, creating overlays, and understanding how different challenges intersect. 

The middle design iteration phase is not necessarily where my personal strengths lie but I enjoy the dialogue between identified needs, design options, and client/community preferences.  I enjoy working with our talented designers through multiple iterations that either meet the prompt entirely or present interesting trade-offs—’within your resource constraints, you can have this and this, but not this.’ 

I enjoy the final phase of pulling everything together into a coherent and compelling narrative and figuring out ‘how do we actually get there?’ It’s a puzzle that is often not entirely solved by the end of the project. We can usually tell a client what to do in the first five years, but we can’t really take them through a 20- or 30-year implementation plan. All the variables are going to change after five years or so. The challenge is creating a flexible framework that gives clients the decision-making parameters they’ll need to navigate future changes.

What advice would you give young professionals interested in planning?

I think planning is one of those things that you get better at with experience. There are so many components and disciplines that make you a good planner, it’s really hard to learn them all out of school. So being open to all of those different things is important, but not spreading yourself so thin that you’re only a jack of all trades. Having a lens of your own is valuable—for me, that’s climate resilience. An area where you can dive deeper and offer expertise will be critical not only to your contribution to a team, but also to your enjoyment of a planning effort.

The questions that arise often in my head are, ‘Okay, you say you want to retrofit all of this with additional population or additional growth. How do you also ensure that you’re balancing that with the nature-based solutions and the flood resilience and the energy efficiencies and all of that?’

I think having that focus or agenda as a planner makes you a lot more valuable to a project. It makes you have a lot more interest in something where you could have a light touch on a lot of things, or you could have a light touch on a lot of things plus a deep touch on one thing.