Form-Based Codes Institute at Smart Growth America

Samantha Suter

Owner, Principal
Metta Urban Design
191 University Blvd #678
Denver, CO 80206
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FBCI Involvement

Samantha Suter is a professional urban designer, landscape architect, and planner who has worked throughout Colorado’s Front Range and the western half of the United States. Samantha brings an innovative approach to urban design and planning by emphasizing illustrations and ease of use for the final deliverable. Her work has a strong focus on implementation, and she is leading the country in regulatory illustrations with her work cited in publications nationwide as the benchmark for code illustrations, specifically her work in overhauling the graphic style of the Denver Zoning Code. Her technical expertise includes developing urban design typologies, placetypes, and incentive-based design standards and her past work includes calibrating building forms to support specific urban design principles and applying market analysis to form and density standards. In addition to running her business, Metta Urban Design, she is currently teaching Visualization for Planning at the University of Colorado Denver’s Master of Urban and Regional Planning school and continues to mentor students in effective storytelling and critical thinking.

Samantha enjoys sharing her work with communities; her passion for designing community spaces and crafting regulations is contagious. She is committed to reaching an outcome that reflects all stakeholders’ input with implementable actions and easy to understand final documents. Samantha excels at taking complex ideas, distilling them, then presenting them in ways that people understand and can respond to, and thus as a community, take ownership of the ideas and shape them collectively. This is how Samantha has been so successful as an urban designer and planner, and her work creating visualizations that help to build strong communities is what excites her most about her work.

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