Karen Esslemont

Biography

Karen has significant experience as a landscape architect and urban designer. She has worked in both the public and private sectors and has worked with OPEN - now part of SLR - since 2009. She specialises in strategic masterplanning, with a mix of urban, rural and regeneration strategy experience. She works with a number of clients including national house builders, private landowners, Councils and institutions; her masterplanning portfolio is diverse and includes rural regeneration masterplanning, infrastructure planning, design and implementation for historic landscapes, tourism development masterplanning and economic development strategies.

A significant proportion of her work is however focussed on mainly residential development, from the sensitive promotion of land as part of the planning process, to the preparation of mixed-use masterplans and planning applications. She enjoys working as part of a team and has gained significant experience in facilitation through the course of her work. She is currently actively engaged in the masterplanning of a New Town for Scotland on brownfield land as well as a complex blue-green infrastructure project which is a Scottish exemplar. Both these major projects align with new national policy planning policy addressing climate change and the biodiversity crisis.