You've likely never heard of Urban Collage, but you're probably familiar with many of the projects the urban planning firm has worked on.

The Beltline. The redevelopment of Atlanta's public housing projects. Midtown Atlanta's push to create a more walkable, inviting street life.

Mikki K. Harris/AJC (ENLARGE)

Bob Begle, co-founder of the Urban Collage planning and design firm, leads a group working on Blueprint North Fulton.

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In suburban Atlanta, the company is helping Suwanee create a new town center and the Perimeter Center business district transform into a more dense, pedestrian-friendly area.

Dozens of other projects and efforts bear Urban Collage's imprint, from Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin's dream of returning streetcars to Peachtree Street to efforts to overhaul the Ga. 400 corridor in Fulton.

That client list demonstrates how influential the tiny, 12-person company has been in helping shape metro Atlanta's explosive growth over the last decade.

"Atlanta has been such a great laboratory for us," said Stan Harvey, who founded the company 11 years ago with Bob Begle, a fellow Georgia Tech graduate school alum. "Planning, by nature, you have to wait a long time to see results. But in Atlanta, you see results of the planning very, very quickly."

Urban Collage is far from alone in practicing urban planning in Atlanta. Other notable firms include EDAW, a California-based architecture and environmental consulting company that planned Centennial Olympic Park.

Another company, Tunnell-Spangler-Walsh & Associates, an Atlanta planning and architecture firm, was the planner for the Glenwood Park mixed-use development in southeast Atlanta.

The local firms compete but are collegial, often teaming up on projects. EDAW and Urban Collage, for instance, both worked on the Beltline.

For its part, Urban Collage has helped cities from Fayetteville to Snellville conduct long-range planning studies designed to guide development. In the process, the firm has helped communities across metro Atlanta embrace a new way of thinking about public and private spaces. Harvey and Begle are followers — though, they note, not strict adherents — of "New Urbanism," which holds that places should be designed for people instead of cars.

That means roads with wide sidewalks, neighborhoods with a grid of interconnected streets rather than isolating cul-de-sacs, apartment buildings with ground-level retail, and parking tucked behind shops or hidden in decks to promote pedestrian activity.

"They have significantly influenced the shape, the face, the connections in Atlanta's landscape," said Clara Axam, who met Harvey and Begle when they worked for her at the Corporation for Olympic Development in Atlanta, which oversaw neighborhood redevelopment before the 1996 Summer Olympics.

For car-loving Atlanta, where walking is considered exercise instead of a means of transportation, New Urbanism was initially viewed as an almost radical concept. In the firm's early days, Begle recalled, common urban planning terms like "mixed-use development" and even "townhome" were often greeted with empty stares.

But in the late 1990s, metro Atlanta's highway gridlock reached critical mass. People flocked back to intown neighborhoods in search of shorter commutes and a more walkable, urban lifestyle. Suburban communities, meanwhile, decided to create more mixed-use, dense neighborhoods where people could live, work and play without driving.

Experts like Urban Collage were needed to help communities craft new building guidelines and help developers plan mixed-use projects.

"We're trying to bring some level of urbanity to some places that aren't urban," Begle said, sitting in the firm's office in downtown Atlanta's historic Flatiron building.

Sometimes, Begle said, communities aren't quite ready to fully embrace New Urbanist principles. And that's fine, he said, even if it means working on projects that include suburban Goliaths such as Wal-Mart.

"We like to say it's not that Wal-Mart is bad," Begle said. "It does serve a need. It's about making Wal-Mart fit in with the planned context in the city. We're not so dogmatic."

Urban Collage's first big break came in 1997, when it was hired by the Integral Group, an Atlanta development company, to help overhaul public housing complexes in Denver and Richmond.

Urban Collage has since helped draft master plans for the redevelopment of several Atlanta housing projects, including Grady Homes near downtown and Carver Homes in southeast Atlanta.

Renee Glover, head of the Atlanta Housing Authority, said Urban Collage has a deep understanding of the city's neighborhoods and is expert at building consensus — critical traits considering the challenges of overhauling public housing projects.

"They have helped tremendously in helping translate things often very technical into concepts that the neighbors and affected residents and community groups can understand," she said. "Because without the buy-in, it's very hard to get anything done."

Harvey marvels at how he and Begle, two outsiders who only came to Atlanta to go to school, managed to grow their business at such an early age. "Atlanta has been a very open place for new ideas and new people," he said.