Akemi is an architect and a city planner focused on designing collaborative processes for community-led improvements. She prioritizes finding an effective solution for a given context. This requires her to be medium-agnostic, sometimes designing a cellphone-based program or a crowd-sourcing campaign, other times designing a public space, street furniture, or a transit system. Akemi is the Director of Programs at the Design Trust for Public Space and a co-founder at Sustrato, a Mexico-based nonprofit that recently completed its first NYC project.