About Urban Village Designs
I’m Drake James, and I founded Urban Village Designs in 2020 as a small, for-benefit ecological landscaping company. Over the years though, I realized the deeper need wasn’t simply installing sustainable landscapes—the real need revealed itself to be helping people understand and work with the living systems shaping our land, communities, and organizations.
My work has evolved to meet that need.
Today, Urban Village Designs focuses on helping people see and strengthen the relationships that allow living systems to thrive. Through regenerative design, consulting, and experiential education, I work alongside land stewards, communities, and organizations to recognize patterns within their systems and develop ways of working that nurture holistic health, diversity, and resilience.
Two primary living laboratories ground my practice:
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The UVD home landscape, where long-term care and observation guide ongoing learning.
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Yamane-Bose Food Forest, an educational and community-centered project of the Oregon Sustainable Agriculture Land Trust where I serve as a Food Forest Manager.
Additionally, I continue to stay regularly engaged with community members in their landscapes and organizations throughout the Portland Metro area.
These spaces create opportunities to learn directly from living systems—through stewardship, shared work, and attention to the rhythms that shape healthy land and community.
Urban Village Designs invites people to engage with this work through collaborative design and consulting, Living Lab experiences, and regular workshops.
Together, let's nurture the living systems on your land, in your communities and organizations to increase an abundant and resilient future for everyone.
We have never worked with a company exhibiting the diligence, integrity and communication skills of UVD, and we’ve worked with many, in several states. They were transparent and up-front about costs and timelines, and the likelihood of divergence (and its potential cost/benefit) from those things. In sum, they are the very definition of professionalism. Personally, I’ve never met more likable, personable, trustworthy people - we gave them free rein of our property, inside and out. Last, but not least, we felt like their pricing was fair and reasonable. Anyone in need of a highly professional, reasonable, talented landscape company with a focus on creating beneficial habitat for birds and pollinators could do no better than to utilize this dynamic young company. They're a class act in every sense of the word.
-Chris H.
