Interboro Partners

Big thanks to everyone who joined us for the first beta test of Temperature Check, our new board game about the messy, funny, and all-too-real politics of climate adaptation. In the game, players are a Mayor of a coastal community that has to juggle everything from heatwaves and flooding to development proposals, federal grants, and the ever-rising pressure of public opinion. Over the course of four years in office, players have to make hard calls: should they approve that new hotel to boost the tax base, or invest those funds in a living shoreline? Should they take a bribe from the developers (and risk indictment later), or hold out for a grant that might never come? The game board may be fictional, but the trade-offs aren’t!

In the coming weeks, we’ll be putting the finishing touches on the design.
 

Upcoming Lecture by Interboro’s Tobias Armborst
Milano Arch Week 2025: Inequalities and Architecture

November 1 2025, 4.00pm
Free admission upon registration - link in bio 🔗

For Milano Arch Week 2025 Tobias will be lecturing on designing public spaces and processes in American cities now.

Photos:
1) Milano Arch Week: Inequalities and Architecture
2) Refreshing, photo by Dean Kaufman, Dean Kaufman Photography
3) Over The Ring, photo by Interboro Partners
4) Campau/Davison/Banglatown Neighborhood Plan, photo by Interboro Partners

Interboro and Key Strategic Group led several pop up events in Vivian Astra Park, and Hickey Park in partnership with the City of St. Louis. It was a weekend full of fun engagement activities in the Baden and North Pointe neighborhoods in North St. Louis!

The City Planning Commission has APPROVED the Jamaica Neighborhood Plan! 🎉

Interboro was the lead for community engagement for the Jamaica Neighborhood Plan. We designed a variety of engagement activities for the steering committee, working groups, and focus group meetings. These activities, both in-person and virtual, were developed to get feedback from as many people as possible, and to connect with audiences that are often marginalized or excluded from conventional planning and design processes.

The Jamaica Neighborhood Plan would update zoning to bring much-needed housing to Jamaica, Queens. The plan would create the largest mandatory inclusionary housing area in NYC, leading to 4,000 permanently-affordable, income-restricted homes.

The Resource Expo
Midwest-Tireman Framework Plan
📍Equity Alliance, Detroit, MI

A variety of engagement tools and methods were used throughout the process in order to reach the widest audience possible, and to learn from a broad range of perspectives. For this Framework, resident needs and priorities are synthesized and paired with urban design analysis to form the building blocks of the recommendations. Some of the engagement tools included public meetings, steering committee meetings, focus groups, story booths, podcasts, interagency meetings, phone interviews and surveys, collaborative mapping, roleplaying activities, critical observation, and a resource expo.

The resource expo was a large component of the final public meeting inviting local businesses, nonprofits, farmers, and City agencies to set up tables and share resources and information with residents who attended the meeting.

ZoneDetroit Engagement Activity
📍Detroit, MI

In 2019, the Detroit City Planning Commission (CPC) publicly launched ZoneDetroit, a multiyear process to comprehensively update Detroit’s outdated zoning ordinance. In order to foster meaningful conversations about zoning among the city’s diverse communities, CPC needed a tool for making zoning approachable and understandable for all, regardless of people’s prior knowledge or experience. Interboro responded by creating two simple, flexible, interactive, and educational tools that could be used in a wide variety of settings, from large public events to block club meetings to youth workshops: a board game (Game of Zones) intended to teach people about zoning, and a newsletter that presented our code revision recommendations in a colorful, fun, and easy-to-understand format.

💭Our recent New York Forward Walkshop in Athens, NY

For many plans Interboro has worked on, we have organized topical listening tours. Our preferred approach is to see what issues emerge in early engagements, then organize tours around these issues (for example, flooding, housing, traffic calming, etc.). While these tours are typically led by consultants and city department leads, we may also look for a few local volunteers to act as tour guides. Local guides can provide an important insider’s perspective that would be difficult to glean from maps and data alone.

Land Use Designation Explainers - St. Louis Strategic Land Use Plan (SLUP)

The land use designations are categories that are applied to each parcel of land in St. Louis. These designations help generally describe the future vision or aspiration for all of the types of areas within the city, describing what kinds of buildings, uses, and forms will be encouraged. Another way to put it is that the SLUP’s land use designations represent different “types of places” that we are trying to encourage throughout the city.

Each designation includes details such as encouraged uses, discouraged uses, and guidance on how land uses should connect to streets, sidewalks, and the public realm. The explainers provide more detail on each designation, their specific intensities, and the differences between them. The graphic above shares some explainer examples of the 16 different land use designations for St. Louis.

📍Baden-North Pointe, St. Louis
Neighborhood Sign Campaign
For this campaign, 27 vacant properties throughout Baden and North Pointe have been selected. All of these sites and buildings are currently owned by the Land Reutilization Authority (LRA) of the City of St. Louis. Each property has its own unique history and characteristics but also its own potential.

The LRA, established in 1971, is the oldest land bank in the United States. It is responsible for the stewardship and sale of previously abandoned and foreclosed properties. With programs designed to convert unoccupied properties back into productive use, the LRA strives to provide housing, attract new industries, add jobs for citizens, and grow tax revenues for the City of St. Louis.

Over the next few months, we hope you’ll watch out for these colorful signs throughout Baden and North Pointe. Each unique sign shares some information about the property and poses a question that has come up during the neighborhood planning process. If you visit the initiative website, you’ll find a link to a survey where you can respond to the questions on the signs. Every sign has a number that you can reference when responding.

www.planstl.com
[email protected]
(314) 717-1434