Usually we hear of local jobs lost to growing Asian economies. And hiring in real estate? A rarity! Well, a Laguna Beach urban design firm has hired five workers — and has plans to add a similar amount the rest of this year — thanks to burgeoning business from China.

SWA Group’s Laguna Beach office — designers of Orange County neighborhoods  from Shady Canyon to Woodbury — reports that it has seen its usual overseas workload “doubled and tripled … in part because China’s growth merely moderated during the recession.”

Among the China projects SWA in Laguna Beach is handling are: 7,500-acre Asian Games complex of stadiums, housing, retail and open space in Guangzhou for thi August. City expansions in Shunde, Changsha Liuyang and on Hengqin Island directly opposite Macao.

Sean O’Malley, managing partner at SWA in Laguna Beach, says his group added $3 million in overall business in the past 18 months, both domestically and internationally. He credits recent success to his group’s environmentally friendly design style favoring projects that, “fit the environment and geography, not bulldozed to fit a street-grid.”He says: “Nature and city can co-exist and prosper … and in fact, the greater the density, the greater the possible success for such a union.

Where some see such juxtapositions as opposites, a city and its environment cannot exist without the other, and are more sustainable when it is reflected in their design … The green movement has put much emphasis on green roofs, green walls, green everything, when the real environmental savings can be realized only when open space, land use, transportation, energy, food production, decentralization, and pedestrian scale are considered as one integrated whole.”