Ela Dokonal

Ela is a senior urban designer and town planner, offering services to developers and municipalities. Her work has an emphasis on compact, mixed use development with mixed housing types for mixed income and inter-generational, appropriately dense, human scale, pedestrian oriented development, linked by mass transit. She is an advocate for light imprint methodologies that offer tools and a range of environmental strategies for different landscapes and urban conditions, adjusted according to the appropriateness of their use in each transect zone and used collectively at the sector, neighborhood and block scale. Ela brought this expertize to several international urban design and planning research projects, including Huludao (China), with task of designing an eco-city to serve as a model of urbanization for North-Eastern China.

Ela is co-author of several adopted Design Guidelines formulated with innovative approach. She is also an artist focused on urban landscapes and production of renderings and pen and ink drawings. The latest exhibit THE INTERACTIVE ART EXPERIMENT was an exploration of the connection between art and technology while addressing current planning issues and encouraging the “buy local” message.

Ela is certified by the American Planning Association’s professional institute- the American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP) and by the US Green Building Council as a LEED AP; and holds a Masters degree in Architecture and Urban Planning (MArch) from the University of Zagreb, Croatia. Ela is also a graduate of the Form Based Code Institute and a long term member of CNU. She is running StudioLEED.com and PenAndInker.com.