One year after completing Nashville’s first UrbanPlan (UP) workshop, the team was invited back to host a second workshop at the Civic Design Center on July 11th and 12th with fifteen architecture students from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK). The students are part of a summer urban studio taught by professors Will Rosenthal and Clay Adkisson, who are both ULI members and managing partners of the local development firm openworks. Will and Clay have first-hand knowledge of the development process and the benefits of the UP program for their students. Building on the success of last year, they made the decision to implement it as an ongoing part of their summer semester curriculum. 

With a goal to grow the program, the UP steering committee was interested in exposing additional students and schools to the experience. UTK and the Civic Design Center graciously allowed the UrbanPlan team to invite six other students to participate in the workshop, five summer interns representing, Belmont University, UTK and Montana State University and an incoming freshman at the University of Colorado Boulder. The additional students broadened both the diversity of the teams as well as the range of perspectives.   

“My group had students from UTK and CU Boulder in addition to myself and one other person from Belmont, so we had a variety of backgrounds and levels of knowledge. This allowed for us to have a range of perspective and it was quite interesting to hear from other students who are in a similar spot as me but with a slightly different educational experience.” 

The team also welcomed two faculty from Belmont University’s O’More College of Architecture & Design to sit in on the workshop, Dean Jhennifer Amundson and Assistant Professor Fernando Lima.  This first-hand exposure will aid in furthering discussions with Belmont as to what UrbanPlan could look like at their school.  

As a part of each workshop, the students are divided into development teams to compete for the best urban plan in a simulated RFP process. All team members are assigned roles that they maintain throughout the process: Site Planner, Financial Analyst, Marketing Director, Neighborhood Liaison, and Environment & Equity Director. At the end of workshop, the teams “pitch” their work to a mock City Council comprised of ULI Member volunteers, who take on the persona of fictitious community members to challenge the students on their solutions. 

The students in this workshop embraced their roles, while also learning to collaborate to reach decisions. One student commented that they were most surprised by “how every decision was made within the group, instead of individuals bringing forth ideas that were already decided.” Another student added “My group was very cohesive in the way that we approached the task. Everyone at one point or another contributed and used their voice to share an idea. There were healthy debates that spawned new ideas and others where everyone was on board.”  

While the City Council deliberated to decide the winning team, a ULI Sponsor firm presented a case study to the students. Ryan Terrell with ESa presented on a local urban development that highlighted many of the parallels between a real-world project and the scenarios the students played out in the workshop. Seeing the connectivity between the case study and the workshop experience helped to further reinforce the concepts UrbanPlan aims to teach. One of the student’s relayed that their biggest take-away from the workshop was “understanding the complexity of a process like this and how there are many moving part that must be taken into consideration.” 

Over the course of the two days, 14 ULI Nashville members volunteered to facilitate discussions and guide the teams through the process. Upon completing the workshop a student commented that they “were very surprised with the extensive amount of volunteers we got to meet and everyone’s different backgrounds that contributed to the structure of the workshop.” The UrbanPlan program owes much of its success to the volunteers who invest their time to make each workshop possible. We want to thank all of them as well as UTK and the Civic Design Center for their ongoing commitment to UrbanPlan. We look forward to further expanding our outreach and continuing to impact positive change in the Nashville Community!