Creative Arts, Culture and Tourism
Sowmya Parthasarathy
Investing in arts and culture is powerful way to boost identity, build a local place-brand, create a high-quality visitor experience, promote tourism, and create economic opportunity. While bricks-and-mortar initiatives such as museums, theatres, and arts centres can be effective and highly visible investments, combining it with a complementary approach to arts and cultural programming that invites wider community participation is shown to deliver long-lasting and sustainable outcomes. We are here to support you in understanding the role of creative arts, culture and tourism in your projects.
The type of support we can offer includes:
support on developing creative arts and culture projects and considerations for successful programming
support on Covid-19 recovery in relation to tourism
access to online seminars, surgeries and direct 1-1 support
Sowmya Parthasarathy
Sowmya is an architect and urban designer with over 25 years of global experience in the UK, US, and Asia. She is a Director in Arup’s Integrated City Planning group where she leads city-scale and neighbourhood-scale projects working across architecture, urban design, planning, engineering, transport, and sustainability. Her expertise lies in masterplanning and strategic planning for new development and regeneration in urban areas confronting significant change and growth.
Sowmya has been a designer and lead advisor for projects in both the private and public sectors and brings a deep understanding of how partnerships and collaborative working can help translate ideas into implementation. She has significant experience in arts and culture led urbanism, including:
the integration of public art programmes (London Olympic Legacy Masterplan);
redevelopment anchored around a major arts institution (York Central adjacent to the National Railway Museum);
visitor experience based placemaking (Broadgate Placemaking Strategy in London) ; and
embedding cultural landscapes into masterplans (Wellcome Genome Campus in South Cambridgeshire, and St. Cuthbert’s Garden Village in Carlisle).
She is currently project director for an Arup University research initiative examining the role of urban lighting in supporting the night-time experience and economy of our towns and cities. Sowmya was appointed in 2017 as a Mayor’s Design Advocate with responsibility to work with London’s City Hall and boroughs to advance the Good Growth by Design programme. She is member of the Greater London Authority’s London Review Panel and the design review panel for Transport for London.