A Cornell team comprised of students from three different graduate programs received an Honorable Mention at the 2023 ULI Hines Urban Design Competition last month. With guidance from their advisor, CRP Lecturer Mitch Glass, team members Shunyi Hu (MRP ’24), Qianchen Yu (MRP ’24), Katie Zheng (MRP ’24), Yani Zhang (MLA ’24), and Jie Dong (MSAAD ’24) competed against over 420 students from 39 universities spanning across the United States, Canada, and India.
ULI – the Urban Land Institute – is an independent, non-profit, research and education organization based in Washington, DC. Originally incorporated in 1936, it’s now the largest network of cross-disciplinary real estate and land use experts in the world. The yearly competition offers graduate students the opportunity to form their own multidisciplinary teams and engage in a challenging exercise in responsible land use. Teams of five students pursuing degrees in at least three different disciplines have two weeks to devise a development program for a real, large-scale site. Teams provide graphic boards and narratives of their proposals including designs and market-feasible financial data.
This year, the project site was located in North Charleston, South Carolina at the confluence of the Cooper River and Noisette Creek in the vicinity of the Charleston Navy Yard Historic District. The site shares proximity with diverse and culturally significant neighborhoods, including Charleston Heights and Park Circle, the first “garden city” development in the southeastern US. Although the naval base uses are now gone, economic development has been strong in the area through the addition of manufacturing, service, and other employment centers. This has led to development pressures to build more housing, commercial, and hospitality uses while maintaining affordability and a sensitive approach to community and environmental issues. Located in the floodplain, students were challenged to envision the site as a water-receiving landscape with reasonably scaled development that would be compatible with future climate impacts.
Cornell’s submission, the STAGE project, is a contemporary and affordable mixed-use community in North Charleston. As site has enormous potential for mixed-use development but is located in a segregated community with extreme flood risk vulnerability, Cornell’s proposal aimed to build the site as a ‘STAGE’ to exhibit local culture, stimulate the economy, and enhance the site’s flood resilience. The STAGE is designed based on four pillars: equity, economic vitality, resilience, and connectivity. The students utilized existing configurations and form, following a horizontal configuration at the waterfront to allow access from the main roadway, renamed “Beat Parade” to the waterfront. The vision is to establish this site in North Charleston as a STAGE to exhibit its vitality, resilience, and culture.
After the intense, yet fun, two-week competition, MRP student Katie Zheng, was grateful for the opportunity to participate in the competition, where she made countless memories with her teammates.
“The competition taught me how to pitch and communicate ideas in a team with such different ways of thinking…it was rewarding to apply theories and software skills learned from MRP coursework to solve issues in the real world.”
One of Katie’s best memories was the celebration after her team clicked the submission button. “It was so rewarding to see the work we completed come together and knowing it was all worth it!” She urges future students to participate in the ULI Competition and says it will not be regretted. The team still comes together for a good time out.
A call for teams is typically distributed in early November of the Fall semester. Teams register with ULI in early December. Students receive 1.5 credits for participating in a one-week prep class taught by Glass, followed by the competition itself which takes place in January over winter break.