Urban Designer Janne Corneil Joins the U3 Advisors Team!

We are excited to welcome Janne Corneil as a full-time Senior Advisor to the U3 Advisors team. As an accomplished urban designer and campus planner, Corneil will bring a discerning design-thinking lens to U3’s impactful work with university anchors and cities.

With more than 25 years of leadership experience, Janne’s holistic design approach and talent for storytelling has contributed to unlocking the complex and intractable challenges of dozens of universities and their cities, linking the aspirations for placemaking and innovation with the realities of land use and real estate markets. Her new role formalizes a decade-long collaboration with U3, extending the firm’s impact through well calibrated urban design strategies that align mission-driven academic, community, research, innovation, and economic development goals that advance a shared vision for campus and city building. Recent examples include the Somerville Audi Urban Partnership, University of Buffalo Innovation District Plan, and the University of Calgary Research Park Vision and Strategy.

Janne has worked in architecture, international development, urban design and campus planning in the U.S. and abroad. For ten years as a partner at Sasaki Associates, she led the campus planning practice and played a lead design role on many master plans for campuses, innovation districts and urban districts. Since 2012, she has practiced as an independent planning and urban design consultant, working at the University of Texas at Austin, University of Washington, Seattle, Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Norway, Oakville Life Sciences and Technology Innovation District, Memphis Medical District, and the University of Buffalo Innovation District, to name a few. Janne’s collaboration with U3 began in 2008 on a campus master plan for the Auraria Higher Education Center in Downtown Denver. Since then, Janne has worked with us on dozens of efforts including in Detroit, Memphis, Seattle, Buffalo, Calgary, and Pittsburgh. She studied architecture at the University of Toronto and Urban Design at Harvard University, embarking on a path taking her from Canada to Scandinavia and Mozambique, to the West and back to the East Coast.

A common thread that ties her design work is her pressing need to discover the latent potential of people and their places, and to weave the diversity of voices and the complexity of everyday things together into a compelling shared vision. Her drive to capture the potential of new economic prospects that stem from the industriousness of people, has led her on an intellectual journey from exploring the post-industrial future of Rust Belt cities, to researching small- to medium-size manufacturing enterprise networks in Northern Italy, and eventually to understanding the intricacies and dimensions of innovation ecosystems. Working with universities and cities, communities and developers, she has a knack for urban storytelling: visualizing the possibilities for positive change helps build consensus and leadership, improves people’s lives, and inspires learning and creativity.

We welcome Janne to our fold!