Planning Team
The planning team is comprised of a Steering Committee, the Town of Brookline’s Planning and Community Development Department, and a consultant team (led by Agency Landscape + Planning).
Steering Committee
Paul Warren,
Select Board Representative
Linda Hamlin,
Planning Board Representative
Al Raine
Annie Finkenbinder
Betsy Pollock
Carol Gladstone
David Lyons O’Connor
Janice Kahn
Kathleen Scanlon
Linda Olson Pehlke
Liz Linder
Lun Ning
Marissa Cheng
Maxim Sheinin
Richard Myles Murphy
Susan Podziba
The charge of the Comprehensive Plan Steering Committee is to facilitate the creation and recommendation of a comprehensive plan that reflects the values and needs of Brookline. By engaging stakeholders, fostering collaboration, and aiding the consultant, the Steering Committee will ensure that the comprehensive plan represents a collective vision for a vibrant, inclusive, and resilient community.
Planning Department
The Department of Planning & Community Development is the lead department.
Jake Collins is a community planner with the Town of Brookline. He is the point of contact for the plan (jcollins@brooklinema.gov or (617) 730-2090).
Consultant Team
Agency Landscape + Planning
Agency is the capacity of human beings to act, to make choices. Planning can remove barriers. Design is an act of optimism. Optimism and action are much needed, today more than ever. Agency Landscape + Planning believes in the power of people to initiate and make purposeful, positive change.
Agency is a women-owned small business (WOSB) and certified DBE/WBE practice based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Their work engages the full spectrum of design services - from strategic planning to complex public realm implementation. It is tied together by a commitment to public sector work with deep community engagement.
Innes Associates
Innes Associates joins the team for zoning and land use planning. Founder Emily Keys Innes brings experience working with communities throughout Massachusetts on comprehensive plans, with a focus on zoning and land use.
Emily Keys Innes founded Innes Associates in 2020 to continue her urban planning and design practices. Less than three years after opening, Innes Associates is entering their next phase with a new office and expanded staff to address our clients’ needs. They work with communities of all sizes, assisting with planning at all scales: from lots to neighborhoods to entire towns or cities. Their goal is to help people communicate about meaningful change in their communities.
Bowman
Bowman’s Community Transportation Group is a multidisciplinary team of professional planners, engineers, designers, and public engagement specialists who are based in Bowman’s New England region. Each member of our Community Transportation Group embraces active, multimodal transportation as part of their everyday commute, whether that’s walking, biking on a personal bike or bike share, or using public transit. They seek solutions to incorporate traffic calming elements to improve corridor and intersection safety, while providing sufficient capacity for future travel demands and to better integrate transit accommodations and pedestrian and bicycle facilities.
RKG Associates
RKG Associates will provide economic consulting. RKG Associates specializes in the application of economic analysis to economic development, real estate development, and financing issues toward the goal of attracting private sector investment and job creation.
RKG Associates, Inc. is a full service economic, planning, and real estate consulting firm with offices located in Boston, MA, Alexandria, VA, Atlanta, GA, and Dallas, TX. Since their founding in 1981, the firm has successfully completed more than two thousand consulting projects regionally, nationally, and internationally, providing a comprehensive range of economic, planning, marketing and management services to governmental, business and institutional clients.
Grayscale Collaborative
Grayscale Collaborative will lead engagement and equity, with support from expert Ceasar McDowell of Civic Designers. Grayscale Collaborative was founded in 2015 as a 100% minority-owned urban design and planning firm (DBE-certified in MA) to work with public and private clients in diverse cultural and political environments to address equity challenges, build relationships, and advance more inclusive communities.
Grayscale works with a range of partners to imagine and create more inclusive communities, infrastructures, and plans by leveraging urban design and planning processes toward more equitably distributed resources, opportunities, and power.
Utile
Utile joins the team for urban design and zoning form. Utile brings extensive experience working with communities throughout Massachusetts on comprehensive and neighborhood plans.
Utile is a planning and architecture firm that is built like a think tank. By developing well-researched, locally specific design methodologies for each project, they offer original and effective solutions that integrate existing conditions while setting the standards for the cultivation of a meaningful urban realm. In all of their planning and design work, they use leading edge policy and engagement approaches to arrive at solutions that are comprehensive, intersectional, and multi-scalar.
Civic Designers
Civic Designers has over twenty years of experience designing and implementing stakeholder engagement and community, leadership, and organizational development among those striving for justice and sustainability. Design, facilitation, and strategic thinking are at the core of the work.
Three essential ideas are embedded in all of CD's work:
1. Power, equity, and inclusion
2. Networks as the unit of action for social change
3. Love as a motivating force for social change
