I’m Colton Johnson, a Planner at HWC Engineering in Indianapolis, where I’ve contributed to innovative plans for Indiana communities such as Zionsville, Whiteland, Carlisle, Hammond, and Boone County. Since joining HWC in 2024, I’ve deepened my expertise in public engagement and outreach, GIS, ESRI software, the Adobe Suite, project coordination, and professional plan writing. With an additional five years of academic training in Urban Planning at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, my strong background in planning drives my ongoing passions of making cities financially resilient.

With experience in both public and private sector planning through internships in Atlanta and Champaign and my current employment in Indianapolis, my passion lies in creating fiscally resilient, human-scaled places by integrating thoughtful land use, zoning, physical design, and data visualization to illustrate these concepts. As a Strong Towns and Indiana APA-IN member, I bring a focus on incremental, high-return investments, illustrated in my graduate capstone—a return-on-investment analysis of Champaign mapping where the built environment supports, or undermines, long-term financial sustainability.