3 years ago I was invited to spend a day with the Urban Land Institute (ULI) in DC, joining a really diverse group of professionals across a range of industries to test-drive a very intriguing curriculum to engage teenagers in urban planning scenarios. A few were high school teachers at a few select schools in the DC area, as well. The invitation grew out of ULI's rekindling of a previously-shelved-curriculum that was created at the University of California, Berkely (1970's/1980's?) that was meant to provide an innovative teaching tool for urban planning. I was excited to be there for a number of reasons...but front and center were my students at Friendship Public Charter School who I was in the process of building an architecture, design and planning program for, and sensing a unique opportunity to partner with ULI to provide a facet of curriculum known as UrbanPlan. Paula Blaiser was the leader that day and a true inspiration to my way of thinking:
The mission of the UrbanPlan Program is to: Create a more sophisticated level of discourse among local stakeholders involved in land use decisions through the education of tomorrow’s voters, neighbors, community leaders, public officials, and land use professionals, so together, we can create better communities.
[Urban Plan] is a realistic, engaging, and academically challenging classroom-based, web-supported program in which high school students learn the roles, issues, trade-offs, and economics involved in urban development. It provides our 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.
Timing was premature, as ULI needed to develop it's partnership with 2 or 3 existing school leaders before they could extend the opportunity. But I still keep the copy of the UrbanPlan video at my desk at work and have shared it with a number of colleagues in terms of being a model for a unique summer program we offer high school kids in the summer at our firm.
This came to mind today when I was skimming through the 2.06 issue of Edutopia and came across the "Building Blocks" article that kicked off the following way:
The Elmwood district, in the city of Yorktown, is dying. Once home to a prosperous middle-class population, the area is now the scene of classic urban blight. Most of the residents have fled to the suburbs, neighborhood businesses are gone, and ever since a fire decimated the commercial heart of the district several years ago, virtually all that's left are abandoned buildings and overgrown vacant lots. Crime is rampant, jobs are nonexistent, and if something isn't done quickly, Elmwood's malaise will contaminate nearby neighborhoods. What is a city to do?
If your answer is, "Call in super-motivated teams of high school kids," you score a bingo. Under an innovative program called UrbanPlan, some 3,000 students in economics and government classes around the country have had a crack at rehabilitating the fictitious Elmwood. From the buzz generated by the youthful participants and their teachers, it's starting to look like one of the coolest things going in the classroom.
It is this philosophy that particularly grabbed my attention when Paula was instructing each of us to work through the Elmwood scenario ourselves (intersting seeing a lot of 'experts' tackle this...and the conflicts that ensue, no matter how cordial one tries to be):
"It's a balancing act in real time under real-world conditions," says Paula Blasier, director of San Francisco-based UrbanPlan. The program was developed by the Urban Land Institute (ULI), based in Washington, DC, and the Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics, at the University of California, Berkeley, with input from high school government and economics teachers. "The kids stand in the shoes of people who have conflicting interests -- the architects, finance people, and developers. And they have to come up with a design plan that takes into account the concerns of all the stakeholders while delivering a decent return on capital to their investors and the city," says Blasier.
This is precisely why 'architecture' or planning or design is in my opinion the de facto 'best way' to inspire kids to learn, way to problem solve, way to make school relevant, regardless of whether a kid spends a single day in a university architecture studio or even wants to go the distance professionally. And its why, perhaps, that I get so excited about the program we offer at work or the efforts of CHAD in Philly, as well at the National Building Museum, as well as many, many others around the US.
Yes, there are real skills being taught: economics, development of real estate, etc.; but even more fundamentally is the critical nature of the collaborative process when it comes to urban planning because the stakeholders who are eventually impacted is infinite:
"Each role on the team must be done properly, and the kids have to collaborate to find consensus," he says. "They learn the important skills needed to work in a group -- how to listen to others, how to pull the weaker students along so they can all succeed. They want to win that contract so badly, they even dress up to give their presentation."
Simple role-playing? Maybe. But maybe something that schools should see as a model for how educationa as a whole will need to consider to remain relevant over the coming decades with so much at stake. It's not really even about architecture or design or planning. It's more about a way of seeing the world, marshalling resources, combining the knowledge and passions and needs of a diverse range of stakeholders, and realizing that this is how life itself works when you are a community member.
In any event, check out the "Building Blocks" article...and see what you think.
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