When Beth Foster entered design school, she already had work experience under her belt. Rather than the typical studio internship though, she had accepted a role with a non-profit organization that had a very broad educational mission. For two years, she served as a liaison to US Congressional offices for Close Up, a bipartisan civic education foundation, and developed middle/high school curricula around urban planning issues.
Beth brings this urban, education-focused perspective to her work as a large-scale planner for clients like the St. Joe Corporation; the city of Columbia, Maryland and University of San Francisco, a private Jesuit institution. She enjoys working with institutional clients as they typically approach projects with a long-term vision and strong commitment to mission.
Beth also feels privileged to have developed several very rewarding long-term client relationships as a result of her work. Her campus planning portfolio includes new campuses such as the joint R&D campus at the University of California (UC) Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and urban campuses such as Portland State University and UC San Francisco.
Her two decades of experience in campus and land planning began with cultural landscape planning for the National Park Service, along with a variety of planning and landscape architecture projects for municipal and other public clients. She finds this type of work gratifying because it combines her planning and landscape sensibilities, allowing her to bring an understanding of natural systems and patterns to land use decisions.
Throughout her career, Beth has piled many other hats on her head, including business development, office management, strategic practice building and design quality oversight. In addition to working on interdisciplinary teams with public and private clients across the US, Beth also has assembled and led many internal project teams, several of which have included virtual members in multiple offices and firms.
Beth is an active advocate for sustainable planning and shares her expertise frequently, such as workshops on “Integrating Sustainability in the Master Planning Process”. She also has enriched her project work through involvement with several professional organizations including APA (American Planning Association), ASLA (American Society of Landscape Architects), SCUP (Society for College and University Planning) and USBGC (U.S. Green Building Council).
Beth joined Page through a merger with her then-firm, BMS Design Group, where she was a senior planner. Prior to that, she was a partner at Sasaki Associates, Inc. until they closed their West Coast office. Beth began her post-graduate studio career at ICON architecture, a multidisciplinary design firm in Boston.
She received dual Masters’ degrees from the University of Michigan in Urban Planning and Landscape Architecture, respectively. Her Bachelor of Arts degree was awarded by the University of Virginia. Beth has enjoyed living on the West Coast since 2007 and looks forward to continuing to use her design and planning skills to improve communities like hers.
