Embryonic development involves the progression of a single cell to complex multi-cellular biological structures through single cell and collective decision making based on environmental cues. Here, we examine the role of cell and tissue relative locations and geometries in determining the developmental trajectories of tissues. We focus on the developing kidney in which congenital malformations resulting in adult kidney disease are common and for which there are limited therapeutic options. Understanding the role of native and engineered de novo tissue geometries in kidney development offers a route to better define contributors to congenital disease as well as important control parameters for engineering approaches to build kidney replacement tissue. In the first study, we improve innovative cell patterning techniques to increase throughput. Using our approach, Photolithographic DNA-programmed Assembly of Cells (pDPAC), we can build patterned cell communities in biological matrices at large-scale. We show the ability to build epithelial networks in vitro that recapitulate the network geometry of the developing kidney collecting duct epithelium. We do this through controlling the initial locations of epithelial cell types and fibroblast cell types that supply local mechanical signals to set epithelial cells on a trajectory to form networks of predicted structure. We then build reductionist mechanistic assays at high throughput to better define the growth and migratory response of epithelial cell collectives to nearby mechanical or biochemical cues. In the second study, we probe the relationship between nephron-forming niche geometry and nephron differentiation in embryonic kidney development. We perturb cellular regulation of the actin cytoskeleton to observe increased mixing between the neighboring nephron progenitor and stromal compartments of the mouse nephron-forming niche. Similar perturbations lead to increased differentiation of mouse and human nephron progenitors dependent on co-culture of niche cell types. Fully defining the impact on nephron formation of relative niche cell type locations, a parameter that could be controlled in vitro, would lead to tighter control of the time and place of nephron formation events, and improve nephron density and connectivity in engineered kidney replacement tissues.