Riëtte is HTA Design LLP’s Partner responsible for Urban Planning. She has been leading HTA’s multi award winning planning team since 2007. She is an expert in residential development, design and planning policy with over 22 years of experience as an urban planning consultant. She is passionate about working with communities, research on what makes good places, innovative ways of solving the housing crisis, planning policy changes and its impact on people’s lives.

Riëtte’s team of residential and residential led mixed use expert planners deliver bespoke planning advice and solutions to a wide range of clients from the public and private sector. HTA’s planning team have delivered a significant portfolio of successful planning applications for new homes in London and the rest of the UK working collaboratively with a range of design teams from HTA and other architectural practices. Aside from providing clients with planning advice, Riëtte is also closely involved in promoting HTA’s thinking on innovative solutions to solve the housing crisis, including a suburban intensification project - ‘Supurbia’ - and other untapped sources of housing provision in London, such as its rooftops.

Before joining HTA, Riëtte worked at Knight Frank providing planning and development consultancy advice for housebuilders, developers, financial institutions and public sector clients.

Prior to that, Riëtte worked for OPM, a management consultancy, specialising in community engagement, policy research and strategy advice. At OPM Riëtte worked on a number of built environment and community cohesion projects for clients such as CABE, the Home Office and the Scottish Executive, including a toolkit for successful community cohesion in area based regeneration initiatives.

Riëtte has also worked with the Centre of Urban and Regional Studies (CURS), University of Birmingham, on a number of projects, including a European wide comparative research project assessing the impact of urban form on the experience of social exclusion across different built typologies published as Urbex Report 22 ‘The Spatial Dimensions of Urban Social Exclusion and Integration’.

Up to 1999, Riëtte lectured in planning theory and practice at the Department of Town and Regional Planning, University of Pretoria, South Africa, and worked with several planning consultancies on Integrated Development Plans for townships such as Mamelodi (Pretoria), and former homeland areas such as Ekangala.

Riëtte has provided planning advice on a number of residential led mixed use schemes, including:

• Hanham Hall, a multi award winning zero carbon scheme by Barratt Homes on the green belt edge of Bristol, consisting of 195 homes and the refurbishment of a Grade II listed hospital (2007-2009) (Winner of the RTPI Planning Excellence Award 2015 for Planning with the Natural Environment);
• Permission for new homes and community and commercial uses at a number of urban infill sites across Islington for Islington Council’s New Build and Regeneration Team, including Westbourne Estate (Vulcan Way), Leigh Road (C2 specialist housing), the multi award winning Vaudeville Court, 1A Lyon Street, the Brunswick Close Estate, the John Barnes Library site, Ivy Hall and the Hanley Crouch Community Centre, the redevelopment of the Goodinge Community Centre, and, the Triangle Estate;
• Larger estate regeneration projects and masterplans such as the Dover Court Estate (with PTE Architects) (shortlisted in the Placemaking and Planning Awards 2016 as an exemplar approach to Estate Regeneration and housing growth and shortlisted for the 2017 RTPI Awards), the Redbrick Estate (with Levitt Bernstein), the Andover Estate (winner at the 2018 NLA Awards in the Masterplan and Area Strategy category), and Hathersage and Besant Estates, all for Islington’s New Build and Regeneration Team;
• Community and stakeholder consultation and planning advice in the delivery of the large scale regeneration of the Joyce and Snells Estate, Enfield, for Enfield Council;
• The development of a range of Design Codes and Supplementary Planning Statements for the Dunton Hills Garden Village and two sites in Bedford Town Centre; and,
• Planning advice to Naked House, a new model of housing to access the housing market funded by the GLA.

Riëtte’s team has acted as planning advisors for George Street, Croydon, the tallest modular building in the world, which received Planning Permission of the Year in the Planning Awards 2019.

Riëtte is a Member of the Royal Town Planning Institute and a member of the RIBA Planning Policy Group. She joined the NLA’s Planning Expert Group in 2020. She was listed as Women of Influence by The Planner Magazine in 2018 and 2020. Outside of the office she is often found on a bicycle.