Christine Babla

Biography: Christine Babla, AIA, AICP, LEED AP, is an award-winning urban designer, architect, and urban planner with over 25 years of experience. Christine serves as Ascent’s statewide practice leader and principal for urban design and planning, overseeing urban design and physical planning initiatives. She has spent her career working in urban areas on infill and redevelopment, integrating transit, walkability, and mixed use to create complete communities. She is recognized for her skill in bringing together a variety of disciplines and stakeholders to establish a distinctive community vision and for translating that vision into concise, graphic, and user-friendly vision plans, guidelines, and regulatory documents. Christine is known for her ability to manage complex projects, provide strategy, and streamline process. Her collaborative leadership style and focus on implementation have resulted in successful adoption of dozens of master plans, specific plans, objective design standards, and hybrid form-based codes and zoning updates. Christine’s project experience includes specific plans, community plans, master plans, streetscape design, objective design standards, hybrid form-based codes, and development of feasibility studies, with a special emphasis on smart growth, transit-oriented development, and sustainable design. Her projects have received numerous awards, including an APA California Chapter Award of Merit, chapter awards in Sacramento, Los Angeles, and San Diego, and two Congress for New Urbanism (CNU) awards for planning and urban design. Christine is an expert in developing design standards and guidelines, and has taught city planning at San Diego State University.