Creating a new vision for Land Use in St. Louis
With the Planning and Urban Design Agency of the City of St. Louis / 18 months
Project led by Interboro Partners, in partnership with Code Studio, Menke Consulting, Lochmueller Group, and BJH Advisors.
The City of St. Louis first created the Strategic Land Use Plan (SLUP), the land use element of the comprehensive plan, in 2005. While this document was a critical and regularly-used policy tool for the Planning Commission and some City staff, few outside these groups knew it existed. So in 2023, the update required extensive, creative, and thoughtful engagement to bring people in to contribute to the possibilities that a land use plan could outline for the vision for St. Louis.
As part of an interdisciplinary team, Public Design Bureau led all aspects of public engagement for this important project, as well as designing and leading engagement with technical experts via Working Groups and roundtables. PDB also shepherded the Steering Committee, an 11-member group of passionate and involved residents who were selected by lottery to advise the process.
Process + Outputs
- Iterative engagement to support involvement and build trust. PDB developed and executed six rounds of engagement, each of which built on previous phases, welcoming in new participants. Each round demonstrated to the public how input was incorporated, and invited the public into addressing the tricky challenges the planning team faced.
- Interactive and participatory engagement activities. PDB worked closely with Interboro Partners to develop activities that were participatory in both ethos and execution. In-person workshops often included collaging stickers or drawing, and virtual workshops included interactive analogs. Even surveys included storytelling, allowing residents to share their own experiences vividly.
- Thoughtful inclusion of voices that are often left out. Throughout public engagement, PDB put special attention on ensuring people were invited into the process. This included hosting workshops with specific groups, such as teenagers in the SLATE Youth Jobs program, or New American Navigators, as well as reaching out to past workshop participants to ask them to return in later phases (with neighbors and friends). To facilitate this inclusivity, PDB hosted workshops all across the city, including co-hosting with trusted organizations.
- Facilitation to build trust and deepen relationships. PDB also designed the process and facilitation for the Steering Committee and Working Groups. This focused on building trust and deepening relationships — both with each other and with the City. For the Working Groups, this relationship-building was particularly important, as these individuals and agencies are currently extremely siloed, yet in the future they will be responsible for using the SLUP and executing on its recommendations. For the Steering Committee, beginning to rebuild generations of broken trust with residents about land use and development required a process that was patient, transparent, and sometimes messy. In the end, members of both groups felt comfortable endorsing the SLUP publicly, and have opened up lines of dialogue with city staff.
- Robust synthesis of data from public engagement, local technical expert input, and planning team feedback to create actionable recommendations and policies. Throughout the process, PDB created synthesis tools that reflected back learnings from the public and committee members, supporting collaborative decision-making across the client and consultant team. As the plan began to coalesce, PDB supported the creation of a clear narrative that would resonate for residents, now and into the future, as a positive vision for St. Louis, and a set of policy recommendations that address the concerns beyond the SLUP’s purview.
The SLUP was unanimously adopted by the Planning Commission on February 12, 2025, and is being used to guide land use recommendations in St. Louis, as well as providing a foundation for an overhaul of the Zoning Code.
“I don’t have anything but positive things to say. I’ve been to several public input-type settings, and this was the most overwhelmingly positive of any of those. I’m so impressed by the way this was run and all the input that was taken in, and how we all managed to do that in a constructive way, because of how it was led…I was really impressed with the democratization of the input. A lot of hearings like this are on weeknights at 5 or 6p, and I’m lucky enough to [be able to] come at that time, but the number of events and the diverse ways that they collected input was really impressive.” – Public testimony at the SLUP hearing
Public Design Bureau 