Students Learn About Urban Planning

ULI Atlanta, a district council of the Urban Land Institute, has added North Atlanta High School to its UrbanPlan program. UrbanPlan is a classroom-based, web-supported program in which high school students learn the roles, issues, trade-offs, and economics involved in urban development. The program provides high school students (future voters, neighbors, community leaders, public officials, and land use professionals) with a hands-on experience in developing realistic land use solutions to vexing urban growth challenges.

“The goal for UrbanPlan is to reach out to a diverse student base so that we can prepare the leaders of tomorrow to excel in their responsibility to be active community citizens and stewards of good and responsible land use,” said Jeff DuFresne, Executive Director of ULI Atlanta. “We’re excited that North Atlanta High will be a part of this program because of the school’s diverse student body and record of excellence.”

In this 15 plus hour unit that employs best practices of project and problem-based learning, students form teams and respond to a redevelopment agency’s “Request for Proposal” for the redevelopment of a site in a hypothetical city, with the goal of winning the contract from the city.

Approximately 80 local volunteer urban planners, economists, market analysts, attorneys, architects, developers, city managers, redevelopment agency officers, and lenders serve as the “City Council.” These volunteers challenge the students to think more critically about the UrbanPlan issues, while relating the issues, challenges and decisions they face in their own local projects to those the students are struggling with in UrbanPlan.

Through complex problem solving and interaction with public and private sector land use professionals, students’ learn that the issues addressed, and the skills employed in coming to an UrbanPlan solution represent a “real world” situation.

Other Metro Atlanta area schools that have participated in the UrbanPlan program include Benjamin E. Mays High School, Kennesaw Mountain High School, The Westminster School in Atlanta as well as Georgia Institute of Technology’s College of Management and College of Architecture.

Designed to allow students to explore the market and non-market forces that affect the development and redevelopment of neighborhoods, UrbanPlan is currently reaching more than 3,000 students nationwide at 37 high schools and five universities.

For more information on ULI Atlanta, call 770-951-8500 or visit www.ULIAtlanta.org.