Interboro Partners: Improve Your Lot!

With the Improve Your Lot! project (above), begun in 2004 as a winning entry in collaboration with the Center for Urban Pedagogy in the Shrinking Cities competition, Interboro and the center studied empty residential lots in Detroit and the homeowners who not only remained but spread out and occupied abandoned adjacent lots. The firm documented the practice, seeing it as positive. (In this instance, a homeowner maintains a garden on the neighboring lot, which is owned by a billboard company, and uses discarded signs as ground cover for her plants.) As advocates, Armborst, D'Oca, and Theodore continue to educate the Detroit community on ways of achieving landownership.