Sukanya Sharma

Department: Land Use
Email: [email protected]

Biography:

Sukanya Sharma is a Senior Regional Land Use Planner and the South Shore Coalition Subregional Coordinator at MAPC, where she works on the Generalist Team within the Land Use Department. Since joining MAPC in 2021, Sukanya has led and contributed to a wide range of interdisciplinary planning projects focused on land use and zoning, housing and economic development.

She works closely with municipal partners across the South Shore Coalition Subregion to advance zoning reform, improve local policy implementation, and support capacity-building efforts. Sukanya also supports strategic grant writing and helped secure federal funding through HUD’s PRO Housing grant and the EDA’s Good Jobs Challenge program. As Project Manager of MAPC’s PRO Housing HUD grant, she is working with various partners to create a regional strategy to expand offsite construction, particularly modular housing, as a way to accelerate housing production and create good jobs in the Greater Boston Region.

Sukanya joined MAPC in 2021. Prior to that, she worked as an Economic Development Planner at the Champaign County Regional Planning Commission in Illinois, where she led industry and workforce analyses and supported economic and community development initiatives.

She holds a Master’s in Urban Planning from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a Bachelor’s in Planning from the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi, India where she received the Institute’s Gold Medal for academic excellence.

Areas of Expertise: Regional and local land use planning, zoning and housing policy, economic and workforce development, grant strategy, spatial analysis, intergovernmental coordination.