About Us

Laura and Bill Drummond
Laura and Bill Drummond at Cedar Breaks National Monument, Cedar City, Utah

Atlanta Preservation and Planning Services, LLC is a small, woman-owned consulting firm located in Atlanta, Georgia.  We believe that understanding the past will enable us to craft a better future, and we bring that conviction to our work.

The ongoing collaboration of Laura and Bill Drummond began more than 45 years ago when they met as undergraduates at Duke University.  Between the two of them, they have accumulated seven post-graduate degrees and a son.  Having distinct yet complementary academic and professional interests, they also share passions for history, hiking, and mapping.

Laura Drummond

Laura Drummond is the principal and founder of Atlanta Preservation and Planning Services. She has a B.A. in Religion from Duke University; an M.A. in Theological Studies from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary; an M.S. in Library & Information Science from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill; an M.A. in Heritage Preservation from Georgia State University. She was awarded her Ph.D. in History by Georgia State University in May 2021.

Laura Drummond

She has twenty years’ experience in the field of historic preservation, taught for 15 years as adjunct faculty in the Department of History’s Heritage Preservation Program at Georgia State University, and served nearly five years as the historic preservation specialist for the City of Stone Mountain. She currently serves on the State of Georgia’s Review Board for the National Register of Historic Places, and just concluded her term as chair of the Board.

As a preservation consultant Laura has produced historic structure reports, conditions assessments, National Register nominations, building chronologies, site and regional histories, and has conducted numerous historic resource surveys. As preservation faculty, she teaches the history of the American built environment and the conservation of historic building materials classes. She has directed many student conditions assessment reports and historic structure reports in GSU’s Heritage Preservation Program. As historic preservation specialist for Stone Mountain, she initiated and directed the creation of new design guidelines for the city’s historic district.

Some clients include: the cities of Atlanta, Decatur, Roswell, Marietta, Chickamauga, Smyrna, and Winder; Georgia State University; DeKalb, Cobb, and Gwinnett counties; Agnes Scott College; the Atlanta History Center; the Atlanta Urban Design Commission; a number of historical societies; Ossabaw Island Foundation; Easements Atlanta; and many private clients. Laura has developed specialized digital tools for recording, analyzing, mapping, and accessing historic resource survey data.

Bill Drummond

Bill Drummond, a frequent consultant to Atlanta Preservation and Planning Services, is a professor in the School of City and Regional Planning in the College of Architecture at Georgia Institute of Technology. He has a B.A. in History from Duke University; M.A. degrees in Divinity and Theology from Gordon-Conwell and Union theological seminaries; and a Ph.D. in City and Regional Planning from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

Bill Drummond

Bill has more than thirty years’ experience teaching city planning in the School of City and Regional Planning at Georgia Tech. He co-founded the university’s Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Center, and teaches courses in land use, greenspace planning, statistics, land conservation, socio-economic GIS, demographic and economic analysis methods, climate change planning, and urban analytics.  He served as associate editor of the Journal of the American Planning Association. Bill is currently the Director of the Master of Science in Geographic Information Science and Technology degree program.

Bill has conducted and supervised numerous GIS projects, economic and demographic analyses, and has created  various types of plans, including:  greenspace, bicycle, pedestrian, land use, and climate change plans. He has developed innovative GIS-based mapping and spatial analysis for historic battlefields. He is currently working on Drawdown Georgia, leading a team to model carbon emissions monthly for every county in the state of Georgia.