About Us
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.
The ongoing collaboration of Laura and Bill Drummond began 50 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.
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 served on the State of Georgia’s Review Board for the National Register of Historic Places, and was chair of the Board for two years.
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 taught 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; various historical societies and neighborhood associations; the Ossabaw Island Foundation; Easements Atlanta; the Henry County Arts & Culture Alliance, and many private clients.
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. 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.