Known as the dean of U.S. city planners, Harland Bartholomew (1889-1989) was considered the greatest authority on municipal planning in the mid-twentieth century. Born in Stoneham, Massachusetts in 1889, Bartholomew became City Planning Commissioner of St. Louis in 1919, the first full-time planner employed by an American city. That year he established Harland Bartholomew and Associates, a city planning consulting firm, serving as its chairman until his retirement in 1962. Bartholomew died December 2, 1989. Harland Bartholomew and Associates continues to be active and has designed city plans for several hundred cities across the United States, including Washington, D.C., and Richmond, Virginia in the Southeast to San Antonio and Los Angeles in the West.

Harland Bartholomew and Associates (HBA) set up several regional offices across the country. An office in Richmond was established in 1961. The Richmond office of HBA began with a focus of providing urban renewal planning services to local governments throughout the East. These services continued to be the primary focus up into the late 1980s and early 1990s. International planning jobs began to become more prevalent in the late 1980s and soon grew to become a major market for the Richmond office in the early 1990s. That led to the establishment of a satellite office in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. The Richmond office also began working for U.S. Department of Defense clients, providing master planning services to military bases around the world as well as supporting similar project being carried out in HBA offices located in St. Louis and Sacramento. By 2002, the Richmond office's main client was the Department of Defense. HBA was purchased by the Parsons Corporation in the late 1980s. Their office in Richmond was designated as Parsons Planning Division.