MEET OUR CORE TEAM
Our team is composed of diverse design professionals that bring their unique experiences to create a 'collaborative' hive.
Alexandra Gonzalez
Principal and Co-Founder
Alexandra is a Colombian-American urban designer, placemaker, and Design Justice Advocate. She is the Principal and Co-founder of Hive Public Space, an urban design and placemaking/placekeeping studio based in New York City. She brings a decade of experience designing and transforming public spaces into socially and culturally inclusive environments.
She is the former Senior Urban Designer for both the Bryant Park Corporation and the 34th Street Partnership in Manhattan, NY. In this role, she was part of a multidisciplinary team responsible for the management, design and operation of Bryant Park and other plazas in the Midtown Area.
She believes in the power of public spaces and strives for her work to create memories and connections while evolving the identity and impact of each community. She received both a Bachelor of Fine Arts and a Bachelor of Architecture from the Rhode Island School of Design and holds a Master of Science in Architecture and Urban Design from Columbia University in New York. She has completed the Program on Negotiation from Harvard Law School and the Data Visualization Seminar with Edward Tufte.
Alexandra is an Obama Leader, core organizer for Design as Protest. a member of the board of the Association of Community Design (ACD), a member of the Alliance for Public Space Leadership (APSL), and Design Fellow at the Design Trust for Public Spaces.
Priti brings 13 years of experience facilitating the visioning of a variety of public spaces ranging from parks and plazas to downtowns and waterfronts to street transformations. From ideation to implementation, Priti has a long track record of amplifying her interdisciplinary skill set to translate community-driven visions into short term action plans and designs that give way to long term impact. She has spent many years researching the evolution of public spaces and cities around the world, and strives to apply and adapt best practices to the unique contexts of every one of her projects.
With a background in Landscape Architecture, Priti’s work is rooted in the sustainable design of the public realm and the economic, cultural, ecological, and social growth of communities. Prior to joining forces with Hive Public Space, Priti led dozens of action planning trainings and creative workshops for cities across the U.S., in addition to overseeing a diverse portfolio of projects as a Senior Project Manager at Project for Public Spaces, a planning and design nonprofit that creates community powered public spaces around the world.
Priti Patel
Lead Consultant
MEET OUR HIVE COLLECTIVE
At Hive PS, we understand that today's problems can not be solved by one discipline. For this reason, we have a growing "Hive" of experts that contribute and advise our work in their specific areas of expertise. We are always welcoming new members to our collective, so let us know if you are interested in public spaces.
Trained as an architect and urban designer, Racha has worked in Brussels, New York City, and in Dubai in professional practice, leading the design of urban strategies and public spaces for projects of multiple scale, and coordinating them among multi-disciplinary teams of consultants and client representatives. She has extensive concept design, urban design and strategic planning experience, and has also put together several development guidelines for public-sector clients.
She is active in the academic sector. She teaches masters level urban design and landscape urbanism studio based on principles of ecology and systemic design at MAHS-MAUSP, KU Leuven. She has also worked for the Urban Design Lab at Columbia University, as a researcher to put together development systems and strategies for the upgrade of impoverished urban areas. She holds a Masters of Science in Architecture and Urban Design from Columbia University in NYC.
Racha Daher
Co-Founder
Anai is an Architect and Urban Designer, she holds a Masters of Science in Architecture and Urban Design from Columbia University in New York and a professional degree in Architecture from the National University of San Agustin in Peru, where she graduated as Valedictorian of her class.
Anai is passionate about how cities affect people and how this built environment continuously adapts to their daily needs. Her work is driven by a people-oriented approach, environmental responsibility, resilience and equity in communities. She strongly believes that interdisciplinary collaboration is a must during an urban design process.
Anai Perez
Urban Design Collaborator
Charlie (Carlos) Osorio is an experiential designer with an architectural background, based in New York. He is regularly working on commercial events and public spaces. His interests revolve around challenging social consciousness through surreal constructions, custom fabrications, and historical and cultural research.
Charlie recently collaborated with HivePS on Barreled, an Art installation in Virginia Beach, and Ribbon in LIC.
Charlie Osorio
Art Installations
Nina Ndichu
Urban Design Collaborator
Nina is an Architect and Urban Designer, with a Master of Science in Architecture and Urban Design from Columbia University. She has previously completed a Master of Architecture in Environmental Building Science after completing two bachelor’s degrees, a Bachelor of Architecture, and a Bachelor of Architectural Studies with a focus on landscape design all from the University of Nairobi in Kenya.
Nina is passionate about neighborhood integration, community engagement, and developing designs with an aim to achieve net-zero carbon emissions and urbanism. With her newly acquired degree, she has a better understanding of urban design issues, such as social justice, ecology, climate change effects, and circular economies. Nina has almost fifteen years of work experience in architecture, landscape design, interiors, project and construction management, and environmental design.
Nidhi is a trained architect and urban researcher with a specialization in civic engagement. Since 2012, she has applied her skills to transportation advocacy, placemaking, technical assistance and education projects spread across 12 American States and 7 countries. She strongly believes in the sustained impact the built environment has on the personal and social lives of people that inhabit them. In that vein, she has dedicate her career to advancing design and planning practices that cultivate physical, social, and financial wellbeing for all citizens, especially children in marginalized communities.
She is a proud immigrant, lover of trains, and persistent pedestrian everywhere she goes.
Nidhi Gulati
Community Engagement Specialist
Jordana is a Community development professional and artist with a background in multidisciplinary projects for the built environment to improve health, resiliency, and equity in communities. She is trained as an architect with a passion for social-driven experiences that deepen human connections via public spaces. A big supporter of the global placemaking movement and creator of www.urbanonsite.com -A Collaborative for Urban Placemaking Strategy at the Intersection of Art, Equity, and Sustainability.
Jordana Vasquez
Arts & Community
Katrina Johnston-Zimmerman is an urban anthropologist whose work focuses on analyzing urban spaces to enhance the lives of people in cities. The founder of THINK.urban, a research consultancy firm based in Philadelphia, she has worked with organizations including Copenhagenize, Project for Public Spaces, and City ID to bring humanist philosophy into city planning and design. Her work incorporates concepts including tactical urbanism, human-scale cities, placemaking, the right to the city, and spatial ethnographic research. She is the co-host and producer of the Third Wave Urbanism podcast, a weekly program discussing current affairs in our cities with an intersectional lens. Her new project, The Women Led Cities Initiative, launching in 2017 with support from the Knight Foundation, will bring together women working in urbanism to create a strategy toward a feminist city for all.
Katrina Johnson-Zimmerman
Anthropologist