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UrbanPlan Newsletter: A Returning Workshop Broadens the UrbanPlan Experience
Back to where it all started a year ago, students participate in an UrbanPlan workshop at the Civic Design Center in July 2023.
UrbanPlan Newsletter: Insights from the Professors
July 26, 2023
Each summer, Clay Adkisson and William Rosenthal, both partners at Openworks, lead a course teaching architecture students from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. Last summer, their students got to be the first participants of an UrbanPlan workshop at ULI Nashville.
We got to sit down with the professors this time around to hear their perspectives on UrbanPlan. Here’s what William Rosenthal has to say:
“Every Summer, University of Tennessee College of Architecture + Design students come to Nashville to study Urban Design through the lens of an evolving and growing American city. They come with the skills that architecture schools do a great job teaching: how to think creatively, communicate effectively and design excellent places. Students are not confronted with the balancing act of budgeting, zoning compliance, community benefits, and negotiating with politicians until they get out of school and into a real project.
ULI’s UrbanPlan brings together all of these key ingredients to get at questions of why it’s so hard, and worthwhile, to build our next generation of mixed-income, mixed-use communities that can benefit more than just the bottomline. Importantly, UrbanPlan uses development scenarios that don’t have perfect solutions. Students have to listen to communities and groups with competing objectives, speak thoughtfully about the issues important to their proposals, and make the most of very difficult choices. Ultimately it’s these lessons, that are so hard to teach in a classroom, that will make everyone who participates in UrbanPlan into better designers, neighbors, and civically engaged community members.”
Will Rosenthal, Managing Partner, OpenWorks
Clay Adkisson, Managing Partner, OpenWorks
Photo By Aerial Innovations Southeast
