About

Hi! I’m Stela: an urban designer and city masterplanner, and yes, I did just spend my Saturday thinking about zoning.

Welcome to my website!

I grew up in Greece, trained as an architect at the University of Patras, and somewhere in the final years of that degree fell completely in love with cities, not just individual buildings, but the way places are structured, how streets connect, how neighborhoods feel, and why some urban environments hum with life while others feel like they are quietly giving up.

That curiosity dragged me to UCL in London for a master’s in Urban Design, and then into six years at AECOM’s Urban Design and Masterplanning team, where I worked across the UK, Europe, and the Middle East on everything from waterfront regeneration strategies to new city frameworks. Those years taught me what it actually means to think spatially at scale, to hold a city’s complexity in your hands and try to give it a coherent form. They also taught me that no project is ever truly finished, only handed over…

In 2024 I made the move to San Francisco and completed a Master of Urban Design at UC Berkeley. Studying the American city up close, I became quietly obsessed with a specific gap: the planning instrument that European cities use as a matter of course, a spatial framework that sits between long-term vision and parcel-by-parcel zoning regulation, simply does not exist in the US system. The result is visible across American cities: incoherent growth patterns, development that lands wherever the market pushes, infrastructure perpetually arriving late to the party, and no shared spatial logic that ties it all together. Nowhere is this more painfully visible than in urban cores, the downtowns and city centers that should be the most productive, most vibrant, most connected places in the metropolitan system, and that are instead caught in a cycle of stalled investment, spatial fragmentation, and communities exhausted by reactive planning battles that never add up to a coherent picture. My thesis at Berkeley was a spatial design proposal for downtown San Francisco. It planted a seed. The seed has opinions now.

Today I work as a Senior Designer at Opticos Design in Berkeley, focusing on form-based codes and zoning reform, essentially rethinking zoning ordinances together with the cities. Alongside that, I am building something I care about deeply: a research and practice agenda around spatial framework planning in US cities, starting with downtown pilots that demonstrate how a city-scale spatial vision, grounded in rigorous multidisciplinary analysis, can unlock investment, reduce planning friction, and deliver the kind of coherent, human-scale urban environments that American downtowns desperately need. It is early, deliberate work and I am always looking for the right collaborators, city partners, and conversations to move it forward.

Please, feel free to reach out to hello@stelakontogianni.com for more information on my CV.