A team of University of Maryland graduate students edged out teams from Harvard, Georgia Tech and UT Austin to win the Urban Land Institute Hines Student Urban Design Competition in Nashville on Thursday, April 3rd.
The team consisted of Andrew Casavant (Master of Community Planning), David Esnor (Master of Architecture), Amina Mohamed (Master of Landscape Architecture) and Rameez Munawar (Master of Real Estate Development). The team's advisors were Professor of Architecture Matthew Bell and Tim Phillips from the Bozzuto Group.
As the winning team, the University of Maryland graduate students took home $50,000. The remaining three finalists each received $10,000. A total of 163 teams, consisting of 815 students from 72 universities competed for the first place prize.
The ULI Hines Competition is an ideas competition and is designed to simulate real urban design and development situations. This year's competition was based on a hypothetical scenario in which teams were to come up with ways to redevelop Nashville's historic Sulphur Dell neighborhood as a healthy community.
An added obstacle in the hypothetical was that teams had to take into consideration the stakeholders outside of the neighborhood who had adjacent properties. They were not to be included in the development plan.
The University of Maryland team won the competition with their design, "the Chords". The idea proposed a collaborative effort between the existing site owners and the state of Tennessee. The idea would use regional connectors, culture, living and fitness, as "strings" that would strengthen connections to the downtown area and surrounding communities.
"This year's finalists found creative but financially feasible ways of building off the area's strengths while attending to the concerns of flood resilience and healthy living," said Jury Chairman Bart Harvey, board member of Fannie Mae in Washington, D.C.
The competition, which is open to graduate students pursuing real estate-related studies at universities in the United States and Canada, was established with an endowment from longtime ULI leader Gerald D. Hines. The competition encourages cooperation and teamwork, which are necessary talents in the planning, design and development of sustainable communities.
