Yiwen Zhu
Principal, Urban Strategies Inc.
Sector: Private Sector
Discipline: Planning/Urban Design
Year: 2022
Yiwen is an Urban Designer with extensive experience in Europe, Asia and North America. Trained as an architect, she uses a systematic approach to understand urban complexity, and brings thoughtful consideration to each project with clear design ideas bridging theory, policy and the pragmatics of technical details. She works with multi-disciplinary teams on a broad range of urban projects, including waterfront development, commercial site redevelopment, urban mixed use community master planning and campus planning. Yiwen is a design lead on Urban Strategies’ various local and international projects. She was the project manager on a 97ha award winning public housing community master plan in Singapore, Bidadari Estates. She led a multi-diciplinary team winning an urban design competition for a city centre master plan near Shenzhen, China, setting up a framework for a new city to accommodate 2million projected population in the next 20 years. She also worked on a Historical Downtown Revitalization Plan for Ningbo – a major port city in Yangtze Delta Region. In the United States, she played a key role in the 2018 Campus Master Plan for Princeton University. She is currently working as a project manager and lead designer on University of Virginia Grounds Framework Plan. In Canada she is the lead urban designer providing a vision and development framework for Pinewood Film Studio in Toronto. She is currently working on several community design concepts
for various sites across GTA and in Ottawa. She has also participated a number of large-scale developement application projects, including 2150- 2194 Lake Shore Boulevard (former Christie’s Cookie Factory Site), Canada Square, and the RioCan Colossus Centre Site. Yiwen is currently a member of the Design Review Panel for Toronto Community Housing Corporation.