Tim Smith is principal and founder of the Urban Design and Planning Studio at SERA Architects, a Portland firm that offers integrated services in architecture, urban design, planning, and sustainability consulting. He is a registered architect and a certified planner with over 40 years of professional experience. His work spans a variety of scales, from the site, block and neighborhood to the community, campus, city and region.  

Currently he is engaged in long-range framework planning and urban design for both Google and Stanford University in Silicon Valley, California. He has served as urban design advisor to the San Francisco Mayor’s Office for the Redevelopment of Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay and to the Portland Development Commission for the Redevelopment of the South Waterfront in Portland. He was the lead urban designer for the Avenue of the Arts, the one-mile long, primary north-south streetscape that anchors Philadelphia’s downtown arts district.

Tim developed Civic Ecology, a citizen-driven, whole systems framework for community design and has helped implement the framework in numerous communities nationally and internationally. He co-authored Making EcoDistricts: Concepts and Methods for Advancing Sustainability in Neighborhoods,authored Civic Ecology: A Citizen-Driven Framework for Transforming Suburban Communities, delivered a TEDx talk on Civic Ecology and lectures widely on the topic. 

Tim has served as Vice President of the Portland Planning Commission, on the Portland Chapter AIA Urban Design Committee, the Portland Mayor’s Central City Roundtable and as a member of the City of Portland EcoDistrict Technical Advisory Committee. Tim holds a B.S. and an M Arch. from the University of Michigan and an M. C. P. and M. Arch. in Urban Design from the University of Pennsylvania where he taught urban design in the School of Design. Currently he is an adjunct instructor in urban design at both the University of Oregon and Portland State University.