Eparque Urban Strategies was established to empower cities, institutions, and communities to make better informed decisions about their futures by finding and analyzing data, identifying community assets, and engaging all the people in the process. We do the following:
“Eparque” (in Farsi اپارخ ) is a term used in ancient Persia referring to the person managing an urban area known as an “eparchie (اپارخيا)".
PEOPLE
Rana Amirtahmasebi, the founding principal of Eparque, is an economic development and urban planning strategist and architect who is helping make impactful and transformative changes in communities around the world. With nearly two decades of experience designing and implementing strategies for neighborhood development and urban revitalization, Rana launched Eparque Urban Strategies in 2016. She has since grown her company into one of the leading women-owned firms focused on economic development and urban planning.
With direct experience supporting cities after devastating wars and natural disasters and in this particular time coping with COVID-19, Rana’s skills and insights are needed now more than ever. A multi-lingual speaker and practitioner, Rana serves as a translator, convener, storyteller, and facilitator.
As a trained architect and city planner, she’s just as comfortable working with economists as she is developers or designers. She has worked in different regions of the world and has led and facilitated technical meetings, workshops, and charrettes attended by high-level local and national level officials and industry executives. Rana is experienced in policy analysis and program design and implementation in projects focused on urban planning, service delivery, economic development, urban resilience, settlement upgrading, and land governance frameworks. She holds advanced degrees in both City Planning and Urbanism Studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and graduated with a master’s degree in architectural engineering from Azad University in her hometown of Tehran, Iran.