Bright and early one February morning, a group of five AP Economics students from Boston Latin School – clad in jackets and ties – stood before a city council. In front of them was a large piece of foam core with a printed, six-block urban site plan and decorated with multicolored Legos forming a cityscape. It’s a new urban vision pieced together after weeks of trial and error, thanks to the knowledge they are gaining through a 15-hour classroom curriculum called UrbanPlan.
These students – and others at Bedford High School, Brookline High School, Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, Newton North High School and Boston University – are budding experts on concepts like supply and demand, ROI, absorption, density and blight. With Millennials leading the push towards urbanization, the real-life applicability of such concepts is becoming increasingly important for students to learn. If the trends towards urban living continue, dreams of detached single-family homes and car ownership may never materialize for the majority of students in this and other classrooms.
That’s one reason why UrbanPlan is so intriguing. Developed in the early 1990s by the Urban Land Institute, UrbanPlan is designed to simulate the real-world planning and development process. Students are tasked with redeveloping a fictional community called Elmwood – a six-block neighborhood plagued with economic stagnation, abandoned buildings, increased crime and an overall lack of investment. Through the program, students are exposed to the difficult choices made on a regular basis by public officials and private developers, leading them to develop a deeper appreciation for their surroundings.
Thinking Critically
At its core, UrbanPlan is a new way to teach civic engagement. After crafting a vision statement for the new Elmwood, the teams must sift through neighborhood letters to understand stakeholder interests and decide upon the best mix of housing, office, retail and public amenities. As with any other revitalization process, the students must also determine economic feasibility by forecasting future tax revenue streams and whether or not the city will generate enough income to cover the costs associated with the development.
Assisting UrbanPlan teachers is a corps of 75 volunteers from a wide range of land use disciplines. These planners, architects, developers and public sector officials spend time in the classroom helping guide students through the process of deciding issues like how much affordable housing to include, whether or not to place a homeless shelter in the neighborhood and whether building a big-box discount store best serves residents’ needs. With an emphasis on the Socratic method, the volunteers challenge students to think critically about their plans, defend their choices, and, oftentimes, grapple with long-held assumptions about why cities are designed the way they are.
Once they’ve finalized their plans, the students make their presentation to a mock city council comprised of the volunteers. Each team is allotted 10 minutes to demonstrate that their vision for the new Elmwood combines a strong grasp of the financial, political and aesthetic implications of the neighborhood. Whether or not their plan is ultimately selected, each student expands his or her knowledge of how a place comes to be and what makes some communities more livable than others.
The UrbanPlan experience provides a powerful foundation for understanding the intricacies of urban development and the importance of compromise. It compels students to make choices and understand the repercussions. They learn about the trade-offs public officials and private developers make in order to come to terms on a new building, a new community center or a new public park. This encourages them to think critically about the built environment and cultivate a sense of responsibility to that environment. Regardless of the career path they choose, students who participate in UrbanPlan gain a deeper understanding of their surroundings.
