Natalia Olson Urtecho
Transportation Planner
Natalia Olson Urtecho is the Director of Global Initiatives at H2L2, a Philadelphia based architecture, infrastructure and planning firm and has over 15 years of experience working with international, regional and local entities in the Philadelphia region and abroad in Latin America and Eastern Europe.
Before joining H2L2 she was a transportation planner at DVRPC, the Greater Philadelphia regional MPO and previous to coming to Philadelphia she worked for the U.S State Department in Budapest, Hungary, on NATO accession, international policies, flood relief and evacuation missions, human rights and environmental issues. She co-founded 3Point Consultants, a non-profit dedicated to helping public and private entities become more profitable through environmentally friendly and socially responsible initiatives and she was recently asked to serve on the Wharton/UPENN Initiative for Global Environmental Leadership Faculty Advisory Committee which brings together business leaders with professors at Wharton and other Schools at Penn (Arts and Sciences, Design, Engineering, Law, Medicine, and Veterinary Medicine) with a network of leading experts in relevant fields from around the world to discuss and research selected topics concerning business and the natural environment. She also serves on the Philadelphia’s Urban Sustainability Forum committee and the Delaware Valley Green Building Council Policy committee. Olson Urtecho was appointed by Mayor Michael Nutter to serve on the Philadelphia City Planning Commission and Zoning Code Commission on January 2008 and serves as the Vice-chair of the Zoning Code Commission. She also serves on the Mayor's International Task Force and is one of the founding members of the Philadelphia Green Economy Task Force where she serves as the Co-Chair of the Policy Committee.
She has personal and professional interests in environmental planning, climate change, sustainable building, zoning, land use, infrastructure, transportation policies and development. She has made it her priority to increase the green-collar workforce in the Greater Philadelphia region and she holds a Masters in City and Regional Planning from the University of Pennsylvania, School of Design.