Harvard and MIT won top honors in the 2019 Urban Land Institute (ULI) Hines Student Competition, an annual challenge that brings graduate students together to create a design and development outline for a large-scale site in an urban area. The team won $50,000 as the grand prize for redeveloping a site in Cincinnati that includes portions of a highway, the central business district, and the downtown riverfront along the Ohio River.
This year’s challenge was to evaluate the potential to deck a highway and combine it with adjacent parcels, with the goal of creating a vibrant, pedestrian-oriented, sustainable, mixed-use neighborhood. The Harvard-MIT team, called “The Cincy.Stitch,” redesigned the water front to serve as a center of the region, providing culture and history, public realm, transportation, and new economies to residents and visitors.
Teams are composed of multi-disciplinary students that can each contribute to the idea, forming a fully comprehensive design and plan that includes graphic boards, designs, and market-feasible financial data. Students on the Harvard-MIT team are studying city planning, finance, architecture, and landscape architecture, providing a diverse array of ideas.
The program is funded by ULI leader Gerald D. Hine as part of an ongoing effort to build interest among young people to create better communities and improve urban development patterns. The structure of the competition encourages students to work together as a team, emphasizing the importance of teamwork in the planning design, and development of sustainable communities.
“The MIT-Harvard team stood out because it demonstrated the greatest cohesiveness by an interdisciplinary team to solve an urban challenge requiring multiple disciplines,” said Rose, senior vice president of Continental Development Corporation in El Segundo, California. “The team had a very clear strategy, an achievable plan, a clear and creative financial model, and a presentation that strongly supported and illustrated their plan.”
