Meli Harvey is an artist, architect, urban planner, and software engineer who lives between New York City and México City. She leverages economy, land use, mobility, and the public realm as apparatus for impacting the built environment at scale. In her recent role at Google, she spent four years building an urban planning product called Delve. As the senior-most computational designer, she oversaw the development of a generative design system for architecture and master planning projects.
Beyond her work at Google, Meli founded the open source project www.sidewalkwidths.com which catalyzed a global community advocating for public space enhancements in cities. Her diverse portfolio also includes work with WeWork, BIG Architects, Paul McCartney, LiveXYZ, the Regional Plan Association, and the sculptor Diana Al-Hadid.
Meli currently runs an interdisciplinary practice that merges sculpture, urban planning, and technology consulting. She recently completed a prominent public sculpture in the lobby of 200 5th Ave (the Eataly building) employing computational techniques to predict fabric deformation. Her work has been featured in The New Yorker, Curbed, and Hacker News, and she regularly lectures at Harvard, Cornell, and Columbia.
She holds a Master in City Planning from MIT (2017) where she received the top thesis prize for her dissertation on the post-Hurricane Sandy home buyout programs in New York and New Jersey. She also earned a Bachelor of Architecture from Syracuse University (2011), graduating Magna Cum Laude.