From thesis project to reality: A Q&A with Master of Urban Design alum Bageshri Thakar
Master of Urban Design alum Bageshri Thakar (MUD 2024) offers a compelling example of how College of Environmental Design students can immediately make a real impact on the built environment. Her thesis project, developed for a site in Livermore, California, led to working with the city’s planning department, which is now creating a land-use and policy framework based on her concept.
CED recently met with Thakar, who is now an assistant planner for the town of Los Altos Hills, to discuss her experience of the Master of Urban Design program and how it feels to see her ideas put into action.
What led you to pursue a Master of Urban Design at UC Berkeley?
While working as an architect, I became more interested in a larger scale of design; I wanted to understand the urban context and the forces that shape a city’s form. I realized that when designing an individual building, I was taking the urban system as a given without truly engaging with the forces that created it. I wanted to understand the socio-economic, political, and environmental influences that inform urban fabric.
Berkeley’s Master of Urban Design program was a perfect fit for me, first, because of its location in the Bay Area, a hub for innovation and forward-looking development. I didn’t just want to study past theories; I wanted to immerse myself in an environment where future thinking is actively shaping cities. Exploring the region, I was struck by how dramatically the landscape and urban fabric could shift within such short distances. San Francisco, Berkeley, and Livermore, though geographically close, each offered distinct urban experiences. That diversity of context was a major draw for me.
Second, the program strikes a balance between theory and hands-on, site-specific work. Over the course of three semesters, we engaged directly with real sites and communities rather than working solely with abstract concepts. The entire curriculum is designed to challenge past theories and urge us to reimagine the future of cities. Cross-departmental electives expanded my perspective, widening my knowledge through discussions and debates. These experiences gave me a deeper understanding of how urban forces operate in practice and how to approach them with creativity and critical thinking.
Your first studio project focused on Livermore, a small city about 45 minutes to the east of Berkeley. What were your first impressions of the city, and how did that experience inform your work?
I went to Livermore for the first time with no expectations and happened to arrive during the annual rodeo parade, which was a remarkable stroke of luck! It was the perfect moment to absorb the city’s energy, listen to residents’ sentiments, and to understand what they took pride in. My classmates and I interviewed a diverse group of people, from police officers to scientists, which was incredibly insightful.
One of the most striking moments was seeing the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s float in the parade. The community took a lot of pride and gave a loud cheer for a nuclear research facility, situated in their backyard, which was completely unexpected. This intrigued me and made me want to understand the lab’s deeper meaning to the city. I realized it wasn’t just a government facility; it was a source of identity, jobs, and economic drive. The city’s landscape itself is a visual collision of things that I wouldn’t have thought would ever come together. There are single-family residences , the nuclear research facility, a large shopping mall, and vineyards — all set against a backdrop of vast wind farms on the hills. It challenged my notions of how cities work.
Your experience in Livermore during your first semester ultimately led to your thesis project. Can you tell us about that?
Livermore’s visual collage of suburban life, cutting-edge technology, and renewable energy stuck with me and became the foundation for my thesis. I chose to focus on the energy industry, as I believe it’s a critical challenge for future planners and designers. The project was not meant to be a concrete plan but a provocative idea — a possibility for how different forces could collaborate. I wanted to design a scenario where the government, academia, and the energy industry could work together to benefit the city and the wider region.
My design proposal included a collaborative hub for these different agencies, as well as innovation centers focused on renewable energy. The goal was to break down the silos within the energy industry and make it more accessible and understandable to the public. The Innovation Campus serves as a hub for education and collaboration, cultivating a culture of innovation while empowering the next generation to redefine sustainability within the context of the urban environment. I also incorporated a planned future electric transit station to connect the new developments and make them more sustainable.
My design was a visual representation of how all these elements — the city’s energy landscape, research facilities, wineries, and suburban fabric — could be woven together into a new, contemporary identity for Livermore.
How did policy makers in Livermore learn about your project? What is the current status of the city’s plans?
Professor Chris Calott connected me with the chief of staff and Nadine Horner in the Office of External Affairs at Lawrence Livermore Lab, who in turn put me in touch with Theresa De La Vega and Brandon Cardwell, Livermore’s innovation and economic development director. The city had a similar vision, but for a different land parcel, so my conceptual design resonated with them.
They offered me a position to continue developing the project for Livermore’s Midtown area, translating my academic concept into a tangible, implementable land-use plan. My experience began with the Economic Development Department and later evolved within the Planning Department under the guidance of Andy Ross, principal planner, where I played an active role in this project while supporting a range of planning initiatives.
When I left the Livermore Planning Department, the project had a strong conceptual land-use framework that had been discussed and reviewed by senior staff. The work is still ongoing, with the city envisioning it to eventually become a Specific Plan. The proposal aimed to address core development objectives — such as housing and job creation — while also establishing a new and unique identity for the area. This is where my design thinking proved most valuable.
I feel fortunate that my thesis was taken seriously. It’s incredible to see my academic work transform into a real-world project.
UC Berkeley’s Master of Urban Design program seeks to underscore what is particular about Bay Area urbanism, what the rest of the world ought to be paying attention to. The region’s role in future-changing innovation and technology sometimes plays a disparate or camouflaged role in the physical fabric of place; often the most substantial breakthroughs occur in places we blindly pass by on the freeway or fail to assess as particularly unique. The foundational studio in the curriculum (taught by Scott Elder and Andrea Gaffney) challenges students to radically reconsider this, to find loci of change, to take a hard look at the surrounding places and infrastructures, to consider them all as a symbiotic whole.