About Us

A passion for places

About

Studio Davis is a small and dynamic planning firm with industry-leading expertise in areas including parking and curb zone management, active transportation, downtown planning, and site planning. The foundation of our approach is to bring a holistic perspective to transportation and parking planning, centering the concept of placemaking as the key goal of our work. Ours is a creative process that focuses the unique opportunities and challenges of the places where we work, seeking to learn how transportation systems can support the goals of the place rather than the other way around. We thrive upon balancing technical and political factors to deliver effective solutions to the communities we serve, and ultimately produce plans that are not merely aspirational but also actionable.

The Team

Brian Davis, AICP

Brian Davis is a thinker, tinkerer, and change-maker with a passion for placemaking. A nationally recognized leader in the field of parking management, Brian has worked with cities as large as Charlotte, North Carolina (population 850,000) and as small as Yachats, Oregon (population 950) to solve the unique set of parking issues present in those communities.

Brian has extensive experience will all aspects of parking planning, including leading data collection and analysis, facilitating stakeholder meetings and processes, conducting public engagement, preparing maps and infographics, and most of all, finding creative solutions to the unique set of parking problems that each new place presents. His experience is that the best outcomes arise when city staff and the consulting team are close, communicative collaborators lending their respective expertise toward the shared goal of effective solutions. He is an ardent believer in using good data and clear communication to inform parking policy.

In addition to his role at Studio Davis, Brian has taught Portland State University’s well-known class in Site Planning for the last several years, leading graduate students as they produce a full plan for development of a vacant site. He is a popular speaker on topics related to parking, transportation, and urban design, with recent speaking engagements at the Oregon Main Street Conference, Oregon Active Transportation Summit, Walk/Bike/Places, and many others. His is a founding member and volunteer for the Parking Reform Network, the nation’s first advocacy group devoted specifically to parking policy.

About our branding

The shape of the logo derives from the areas of overlap on a Venn Diagram and represents our foundational approach: Cities and communities are complex creatures, and tackling their problems requires a collaborative, multi-disciplinary approach. You’ve got to consider context, and stave off unintended consequences. You’ve got to work in those intersections.

I was a graphic designer for many years before transitioning to urban design, so I agonized over this logo and branding for far too long; designing the logo for your own startup is both thrilling and terrifying. But I think “Intersections” is a nice representation of our punchy little firm. I hope you’ll follow along here, and consider us for collaboration at our mutual intersections…

I’ve never been a fan of the “studies to study stuff that we might actually never do” and I thought the parking study would be exactly that. You changed my mind.  I actually have something of value that I can work with. Studio Davis delivered a package of solutions that fits the context and the culture of this community.

-Katherine Guenther, City Planner, Yachats, Oregon

Let’s make a place together…

Whether you’re a municipal staffer with a parking issue you can’t seem to crack, or a consulting firm that could use our particular flavor of planmaking to put your proposal over the top, we are ready to get to work and would love to hear from you.