Our History

Founded in 1978 in Toronto, Canada, the planningAlliance team today comprises over 80 professional staff, including planners, urban designers, architects, engineers and social scientists.

We offer clients a comprehensive range of planning and design services, including urban, rural and regional planning, urban design, collaborative processes, visualization, social and economic assessment, housing policy and construction management.

Our projects range from the preparation of local site plans and plans of subdivision, to comprehensive urban development plans for large cities in both developed and developing world settings, to reconstruction programs for communities devastated by natural disasters, through to regional development plans serving vast geographic areas and/or many millions of people.

In many cases, our work includes the construction of the approved plans and designs and, as a result, we have developed a thorough understanding of the relationship of planning and design to what actually ends up being built.

We have won multiple local, national and international awards for our work.  In 2007, two of our flagship projects were recognized with prestigious international awards: Places to Grow: A Growth Plan for the Greater Golden Horseshoe won the American Planning Association’s Daniel Burnham Award, and the Amman Master Plan won a World Leadership Award for Town Planning.

We have offices in Toronto, Edmonton and Quito (Ecuador), and numerous project offices around the world.  We work in a variety of languages, including English, French, Spanish, Arabic and Portuguese, and have extensive experience working with local translators where required.

Importantly, we have two sister practices: rePlan Inc. provides social assessment and management services to natural resource companies around the world; regionalArchitects provides architectural design services to a variety of clients in a number of sectors.