Lakeshia
Wright
A geographer, certified planner, and founder of the spatial strategy studio Guided By Community — one of the nation’s leading experts on spatial experience and spatial empathy, and the doctoral researcher actively defining spatial empathy as a teachable competency.
She built a career on hearing the people who never showed up.
AICP
Certified planner
MCIP-I
Institutional member
PMP
Project management
GBC
Founder, Guided By Community
/ The work
Her method sounds almost impossible until you watch her do it. Give her thirty minutes with a building, a block, or a map, and she’ll show you who isn’t coming and what’s telling them to stay away — the questions to carry back to the people who know the answers.
The five forces she reads.
/ Why she’s the one
Every speaker at your event will talk about people.
A lane of one
The circuit is full of experts on people, teams, and change — and has no one on place, and no one producing the doctoral research on spatial empathy.
An opener that can’t be copied
The Place Read requires a geographer’s eye, a planner’s training, and fifteen years of facilitation. It travels to every venue and is different every time.
Frameworks that are hers
Unintended: A Data Practice, Lost in Translation™, the Translation Gap™, the five forces of spatial experience — named, field-tested, unavailable anywhere else.
A facilitator who keynotes
Not a keynoter who facilitates. Your audience participates, argues, laughs, and leaves changed.
Cross-sector fluency
Planning, transit, public health, environment, museums, parks, higher ed — she speaks each sector’s language and translates between them live.
Formats & booking
The map decides who shows up.
Bring the one voice on your program that talks about where. Keynotes, trainings, and simulations — in-person and virtual.