 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Publications: |
Feature Articles |
UrbanPlan: Building a Model City with a Fresh PerspectiveMay 15, 2003UrbanPlan, ULI’s secondary education land use planning and real estate development program is now being offered as an elective course in the Los Angeles Unified School District, through assistance and a $20,000 grant from ULI Los Angeles. The course is being taught at five public high schools, with the goal of offering UrbanPlan districtwide in the 2004 academic year.Created by the Institute 12 years ago, UrbanPlan is a simulation classroom exercise in which high school students work in development teams to analyze and respond to a hypothetical urban development authority’s request for proposals (RFP) to redevelop a specific urban area. ULI Los Angeles’s UrbanPlan program, which had been available for several years as an extracurricular course, is structured as a competition. It provides $1,000 scholarships to students whose proposals are judged winners by a group of land use professionals, including district council members. In a recent Los Angeles Daily News article about the program, Kennedy High School architecture teacher Aaron Kahlenberg commented on the value of exposing students to urban development challenges. “We have students who . . . want to make a difference in the world. Most of them see so many negative things in the news—if they can shape the world not just into a better place, but also a better-looking place at that, they will feel they’ve done something positive,” he noted. According to Kennedy High School student Crystal Ramirez, a 2002 UrbanPlan scholarship winner, the program teaches the importance of viewing land use from the perspective of community residents. “I put myself in their position. If I’ve just gotten married and I’m coming out of the church, I don’t want to see those ugly apartment buildings. I’d rather see a park,” she told the Daily News. Based on an urban case study, UrbanPlan is the second in a series of high school teaching units developed by ULI. It followed Dilemmas in Development, based on a greenfield case study that was created in 1990 for suburban high schools. In their original form, UrbanPlan course materials are available as hard copy only and the course requires students to create a design and then construct three-dimensional models of their projects. An updated version of UrbanPlan, which is now being tested in Oakland, California, area schools, has been developed and funded by the University of California at Berkeley. The course materials for the revised version are packaged in an electronic, downloadable format, and it uses Legos, which permit students to construct as they create, rather than construct after they create. Development support for the revised version has been contributed by ULI Foundation governors Douglas D. Abbey, Ronald Nahas, and Stephen Chamberlin. The use of Legos—in which different color blocks represent different land uses—allows students to more easily alter their plans to consider a wider variety of development options, noted Paula Blasier, director of special projects at the Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics, Hass School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley. Blasier recently taught the course at Millennium High School in Piedmont, a community just outside Oakland. “Fifteen hours ago, they thought a footprint came from a tennis shoe and now they are talking about density,” she told the Oakland Tribune. “It is extraordinary the demands that have been made on them.” Through UrbanPlan, students are challenged to consider issues such as affordable housing, open-space preservation, traffic patterns, historical preservation, viability of retail or office space in specific locations, and the possibility of neighborhood opposition to growth. In addition to exposing students to career options in real estate, the interdisciplinary program teaches math skills, drafting, social science, public speaking, and the benefits of teamwork. Don Runyan, drafting, architecture, and urban planning instructor at Los Angeles’s Cleveland High School, told the Los Angeles Daily News, “I feel it is extremely important to have an education program that takes academics and applies it to a real project.” More details on UrbanPlan are available on the ULI Los Angeles Web site at http://www.uli-la.org and at http://www.sfrancisco.uli.org. The revised version of the UrbanPlan course materials will be available this summer to all ULI district councils in a downloadable format on ULI’s Web site, http://www.uli.org. Trisha Riggs, communications director Source: Urban Land Magazine, March, 2003 | |
|
|