our approach
Opportunistic urban development requires innovative foresight, strategic planning, and flexible execution to create optimal environments.
Agora Partners works with public entities and private organizations to create vibrant public spaces, mixed-use and entertainment districts, and downtowns through placemaking strategy and consulting. While placemaking can often sound like a buzzword, it means more than that to us. It’s about creating emotional connections between people and place rooted in curated experiences and planned serendipity. Beautiful and thoughtful planning is central to our work, but it’s the experience that makes a place memorable. That’s what drives everything we do.
Our approach blends urban planning principles with entrepreneurial strategies to improve public and private spaces. We operate where community goals meet market realities and opportunities, uniting vision and execution to better serve our clients and their projects. We bring a hands-on approach rooted in creativity, empathy, and rigorous analysis.
Working across the country, we use a business mindset alongside creative tools and public-private partnerships to boost livability, economic resilience, and community benefits. Our team thrives in complex real estate challenges, viewing distressed assets, restrictive entitlements, and underutilized sites as opportunities to rethink what’s possible. With a focus on entrepreneurial planning, our work spans sectors and stakeholders, including public agencies and municipalities, foundations, developers, private landowners, private equity funds, family offices, commercial and investment banks, and philanthropic trusts.
We define value alongside our clients. For some, it means cultural impact, advancing policy goals, or fostering community engagement. For others, it includes generating direct revenue—so long as it aligns with those. We’re not afraid to ask the tough questions, challenge assumptions, and collaborate closely to discover what truly matters.
firm profile
Agora Partners is a planning and real estate advisory firm specializing in identifying and creating value-add opportunities in urban environments. We focus our efforts on the public realm: parks, plazas, streets, sports and cultural facilities and other public venues. We program and activate these spaces to create meaningful, emotional connections between places and the people who visit them to leverage the power of place-based economic development.
Merging the often disparate skill sets of urban planning and real estate development, Agora Partners employs entrepreneurial planning techniques to improve and enhance public and private environments. We employ tools like public/private partnerships, opportunistic management techniques, market research, community engagement and placemaking strategies.
Agora Partners advises governments, parks conservancies, foundations and real estate developers on creating vibrant, well-managed public spaces. We create and execute programming plans and business plans. We structure and negotiate agreements to develop and operate public parks. We partner with our clients at any and every stage of developing a new public destination.
Agora Partners plans and executes downtown and neighborhood turnarounds to increase business viability, livability, sustainability and economic and social resilience. Agora Partners provides solutions for challenging planning and real estate scenarios by engaging stakeholders, fixing underperforming or inefficient management structures, identifying unique opportunities to generate revenue and by employing strategies to unlock public/private partnerships.
Agora Partners’ approach to creating economic, cultural and social value from public space combines comprehensive activation strategies with private-sector management methods to generate revenues and control costs. Agora Partners acts as both principal and advisor, partnering and working with public agencies and municipalities, developers, private landowners, private equity funds, family officers, commercial and investment banks and philanthropic trusts.