Ashrita Shetty is a Bangalore-born, Brooklyn-based urban strategist, researcher, and designer. Her work is dedicated to helping communities and organizations imagine and enact more participatory, resilient, and joyful futures. In 2025, she founded Better Cities Lab, a creative practice empowering urban change through life-centered solutions at the shifting intersection of people, place, and policy. Prior to that, she held strategy and design roles at global firms like Gehl, CBRE, and MKThink where she led projects blending human-centered design & research, systems thinking, and multi-stakeholder collaboration in complex organizational contexts for Google, Cruise, Blue Zones, and Madinah Development Authority, among other corporate, public sector, non-profit, and institutional clients.
Ashrita’s practice operates at the intersection of research and imagination, documentation and speculation, individual encounters to neighborhood systems. With a background in climate-aligned urban design and strategy, sustainable architecture and construction, real estate, and community engagement – she understands how cities are actually made and translates between actors, while maintaining the creative distance necessary to envision better futures.
Outside of work, she has served on Open Architecture Collaborative’s board of directors and been invited as a guest lecturer and design critic at Pratt, School of Visual Arts, and Boston Architectural College. A lifelong learner, Ashrita is WEDG certified, has dabbled in digital UX design and research, and is pursuing architectural licensure in the U.S. She earned a Bachelor of Architecture from R.V. College of Architecture in Bangalore, India and a Master of Urban Design from Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
