Eparque Cultural Planning

About

Eparque Cultural Planning is a branch of Eparque Urban Strategies LLC, which specifically takes on projects related to cultural policy and planning.

We are dedicated to creating thriving places and helping communities include arts and cultural elements as part of strategies to build strong local economies. We have a distinct perspective on city planning, cultural planning and urban revitalization based on our international experience rebuilding historic cities with significant cultural resources. We help communities identify their most distinctive cultural and natural assets and use them as tools or building economic and social resilience in times of economic downturn and in the aftermath of disasters and conflicts. We provide critical services for cultural organizations, artists, government agencies, and developers.

For each initiative, Eparque Cultrual Planning team utilizes a data driven, qualitative, and place-based approach to holistically evaluate and successfully tackle unique challenges. Through our work, we marry spatial planning and cultural policy to ensure that every community has spaces for cultural production and expression.

People

Rana Amirtahmasebi is the founding principal of Eparque Cultural Planning. Rana is an economic development and cultural planning strategist and architect who is helping make impactful and transformative changes in communities around the world. Her practice is grounded in the belief that cultural assets are integral to the creation, preservation and resilience of vibrant, livable, and economically successful communities.

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 cultural planning.

Growing up and surviving a war in Iran, Rana developed a deep appreciation for music, performance, and dance as critical coping and healing tools. She understood from a young age the power of art and culture as a way to honor history, place, family and hope. These core beliefs help guide her passion and commitment to crafting urban development policies, plans and projects that are inclusive of cultural assets and community values.

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. Her unique perspective and understanding of both tools to support arts/cultural organizations and governments in times of crisis and ways to support the preservation and development of cultural assets as a tool of recovery will be needed as related to the COVID-19 global pandemic.

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. As a ceramic artist, Rana is an advocate for affordable live and work space for artists. As an immigrant, Rana recognizes the wide breadth of tangible and intangible culture that different ethnic groups bring to NYC. Art is a tool for remembering, becoming, surviving and visioning. As the mother of two small children, she appreciates the need for art in the public realm that is creative, expressive and thought-provoking for people of all ages.