Sysoma is a placemaking and development firm. We believe how we build determines how we live—and how we live will determine whether we flourish as a planet.

About Us

Sysoma means systems of life. We believe how we build determines how we live. How we live determines whether we endure.

We design and develop places where the social, ecological, economic, and cultural are treated as one whole.

Conventional development asks what a piece of land can produce for investors. We ask a different question. What does this place need to become more alive, more resilient, more generative over time? That question changes what gets drawn, financed, and built.

It means designing with hydrology rather than against it. It means returning to the walkable, intergenerational forms people have always chosen when given the choice. It means aligning capital with the long arc rather than the quick extraction. And it means taking beauty seriously, because places that tell people their lives matter are not decoration. They are how culture stays alive.

A home holds a person. A street holds homes. A neighborhood holds streets, and a watershed holds them all. A developer is not working at one level. A developer shapes the container where the personal, the relational, and the systemic flourish or fragment together.

We partner with municipalities, investors, landowners, and cultural stewards who see where this is going. The future of real estate is not extraction. It is stewardship.

Our Team

Joel Fariss

Founder + CEO

Joel Fariss is the founder of Sysoma, a regenerative development studio built on the conviction that how we build determines how we live. He came to development through placemaking, from his father's cabinet shop to urban master planning at some of the world's largest architecture firms.

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Head of Design + Strategy

Ariel Scholten

Ariel Scholten is Head of Design and Strategy at Sysoma, where she leads the integration of architecture, landscape, and ecological systems across every project. She holds graduate degrees in both architecture and landscape architecture, and her work centers on climate adaptation and the ecological infrastructure that makes places resilient over the long arc.

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