Mandi Chapa

Mandi Chapa is a lecturer at Rice, where she teaches urban transportation in the schools of architecture and engineering. She brings transparency of how planning works into the classroom. She practices architecture and urban design at Huitt-Zollars, formerly Morris Architects, where she leads the Houston Downtown urban planning team and has been part of every planning project in the Houston office.

Chapa has been the project manager and planner for a wide range of projects in Houston and around the United States, including Livable Centers studies for Downtown Houston, North Houston, Washington Avenue, Fourth Ward, Midtown, Galveston, and Rosenberg; a community-driven vision plan for Galveston, a comprehensive plan for Aldine; transit studies in the Twin Cities, Northwest Arkansas, South Carolina, Fort Worth, and Philadelphia; greenway planning for the Houston Parks Board; new street design manuals for the City of Dallas; a flood resilience consortium in Houston, and the I-45 public engagement process for the City of Houston. Her work has focused on design, metrics, equity, and integrating community outreach to identify projects that build more resilient communities. She also serves on the RDA Editorial Committee. Mandi is a graduate of the University of Houston College of Architecture.