About
Disciplined analysis.
Integrated thinking.
Better urban decisions.
Cities rarely present simple problems. Transportation, land use, development, policy, infrastructure, and human behavior overlap—and decisions made in one system often create consequences in another.
Otavio Thompson is the Founder and Principal of Interlock Consulting and an Urban Research & Spatial Analysis Consultant. His experience spans professional research, neighborhood implementation, spatial analysis, and organizational leadership.
Interlock Consulting helps organizations make sense of those connections.
Our work combines spatial analysis, transportation and transit research, urban development, policy analysis, and strategic problem-solving to help clients better understand complex urban questions and make more informed decisions. Rather than beginning with a preferred tool or methodology, we start by defining the problem: What decision needs to be made? What geography and scale matter? Which systems should be examined independently, and where do their interactions tell us something more important?
From there, we build the analysis around the question.
A central focus of our work is identifying analytical functions that are often treated separately and bringing them together into a coherent framework. The goal is not simply more data or more sophisticated analysis. It is clearer evidence, stronger reasoning, and findings that decision-makers can actually use.
Experience grounded in planning, implementation, and research
Otavio’s approach was shaped early in his career at the American Planning Association (APA), where he served as a Research Fellow and gained a unique view into how the planning profession evaluates expertise, identifies best practices, and recognizes successful places.
At APA, he researched planning practices, interviewed subject-matter experts, and helped develop questions adopted for AICP advanced specialty certification examinations in environmental planning, transportation planning, and urban design. He also supported APA’s National Planning Awards and Great Places in America programs, researching exemplary planning initiatives and helping translate that work for a national professional audience.
Credible analysis begins with asking the right questions—and becomes valuable when complex evidence is translated into useful insight.
His work later brought that perspective into practice during a ten-year tenure with the NoMa Business Improvement District in Washington, DC, one of the city’s fastest-changing neighborhoods.
There, his responsibilities extended well beyond research. He worked across project planning, budgeting, procurement, stakeholder engagement, vendor management, cross-functional team leadership, and neighborhood-serving technology initiatives.
He also facilitated the connection between NoMa and APA that brought the 2011 AICP Community Planning Workshop to the neighborhood at a time when NoMa had significant development underway but little dedicated park space. He co-led the neighborhood field tour and supported the planning charrette and final report, helping establish an early community-supported framework for parks and public-space planning that informed later efforts by the NoMa Parks Foundation.
That experience reinforced a central principle of our practice: strong analysis matters most when it can operate in the real world—within organizational constraints, competing priorities, stakeholder interests, budgets, and implementation realities.
Research that connects urban systems
Alongside his professional work, Otavio has continued to investigate questions about how cities function.
His independent research has examined multimodal transportation, food access, climate risk, urban form, development capacity, office occupancy, adaptive reuse, transit, and land-use policy.
More recently, he has developed an integrated research portfolio focused on the relationships among urban form, transportation, occupancy, development capacity, and public policy. This work includes original analytical methods, scholarly research, and cartography designed to make complex spatial relationships more understandable and measurable.
Current research extends that work into questions involving adaptive capacity, downtown ecosystems, and layered rapid transit systems.
What makes Interlock Consulting’s practice somewhat unusual is that prospective clients do not have to take these capabilities on faith. Much of the thinking behind our work is available publicly through the research, maps, methods, and analytical reasoning presented throughout this site.
You can see how we frame questions, how we work with evidence, and how we move from complex information toward practical conclusions before we ever begin an engagement.
A planner’s perspective. A researcher’s curiosity. An operator’s focus on results.
Interlock Consulting brings together experiences that do not always sit in the same place: research and implementation, spatial analysis and organizational leadership, transportation and development, policy and operations.
That combination allows us to look beyond individual datasets, disciplines, or systems and ask a broader question:
What is really happening here—and what does the evidence tell us we should understand next?
That is the question behind our research, our consulting work, and the urban problems we most enjoy solving.