Boulder Strategic Planning
The Boulder community has high aspirations for new development, expecting inspiring buildings that integrate affordability, sustainability, resilience, and design excellence. In other words, new development should be net zero energy, car-free and 100 percent affordable while reducing flood risks and being featured on the cover of Architectural Digest. Why not?
Although the City has achieved significant successes, the process of getting there has been a bit rocky at times, with competing priorities across departments, misalignment around funding and budget commitments, and disagreements between department directors and staff. Those challenges have been compounded by the multiple hats worn by the City in its redevelopment work: being applicant, regulator, designer, funder, developer and even asset manager.
To support a process of shared learning and apply lessons learned to current and future initiatives, the City engaged Community Planning Collaborative to facilitate dialogue among executive leadership and key staff to understand challenges, articulate a shared vision of success, and develop teaming agreements and tools to strengthen collaborative work efforts.
The resulting toolkit provides a framework, guiding principles and a set of exercises to help clarify roles and priorities; structure teaming and conflict resolution agreements; and provide a shared understanding of process steps, project management needs and team structures. The toolkit was most recently applied in the City’s redevelopment of a former hospital site into new City offices, affordable and mixed income housing, a new thermal energy district, public spaces, floodway improvements and mobility connections.