Akemi Sato

Akemi Sato is an urban planner and designer with 17 years leading collective action at two scales: cross-sector coalitions with key stakeholders, and mass mobilizations of thousands of individual citizens.

As Principal and Co-founder of Sustrato, Akemi designs and directs rooted collaborations that convene government agencies, community organizations, and funders around shared civic and environmental goals. Her work includes restoring a 74-acre ravine in Mexico City through an eight-agency partnership, securing one of NYCHA’s rare approved exceptions to convert a fenced-off lot into public green space, and converting an abandoned police station into a resident-run community center sustained through a barter system. All three spaces remain under community stewardship more than a decade after completion.

Through her independent crowdsourcing work, Akemi has organized thousands of citizens toward shared, urban-scale outcomes. She conceived and co-produced MapatonCDMX, mobilizing 3,624 citizens to map Mexico City’s informal bus routes in fifteen days, data later adopted for the city’s official transit planning and integrated into Google Maps. After disasters across Latin America and the Caribbean, she devised a crowd-sourced system matching over 2,000 aid offerings to those in need, and created Libremente, an SMS-based mental health service that enabled two psychologists to reach over 70 mothers following flooding in Peru and Hurricane María in Puerto Rico.

Akemi holds a Master in City Planning from MIT and a Bachelor in Architecture from UNAM. She has spent seventeen years leading civic and environmental projects across the Americas, including as Director of Programs at Design Trust for Public Space, Senior Urban Planner at WXY Studio, and Project Manager at Arquitectura 911sc. At each office, Akemi led award-winning projects: Turnout NYC at Design Trust, recipient of the 2023 FastCompany Award for Social Innovation; the redesign of Sainte Catherine Street in Montreal at WXY, selected for construction; and the Flood Prevention and Crime Reduction Plan in Ciudad Juárez at Arquitectura 911sc, recipient of the 2011 Bronze Holcim Award Latin America.