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ULI Community Action Grant Awarded to ULI Washington
ULI Awards for Excellence–Columbia Heights Winner
Gerald D. Hines Student Urban Design Competition–University of Maryland Finalist Team

A Step-by-Step Approach for Creating Walkable Urban Places: Washington, D.C., and Beyond

ULI Washington was awarded a $25,000 Community Action Grant this spring to undertake a project to quantify what makes a Walkable Urban Place. The CAG comes from national ULI and the ULI Foundation as part of a program which seeks to encourage entrepreneurial projects at the state, regional and local levels to build community consensus for action and change.

Grants are awarded for creative, innovative community outreach, research, or education programs. By encouraging new ideas and supporting the most entrepreneurial projects, all communities can benefit because successful projects can be replicated.

For the proposed project, ULI Washington, in partnership with the Brookings Institution and Virginia Tech University, will convene a pair of advisory panel meetings to inform development of an operational definition of, and performance metrics for, walkable urban places (WUPs) and to produce a white paper summarizing the results of the panels. Interim results will be shared at the 2010 ULI Fall Meeting and Urban Land Expo to be held in Washington D.C. in October. 

Read the press release

A Washington, D.C. project was selected as one of ten outstanding developments in the ULI Awards for Excellence: The Americas competition. The winners of the awards competition, widely recognized as the land use industry’s most prestigious recognition program, were announced in Boston at the 2010 ULI Real Estate Summit at the Spring Council Forum.

The competition is part of the Institute’s Awards for Excellence program, established in 1979, which is based on ULI’s guiding principle of recognizing best practice through the awards to promote better land use and development. ULI’s Awards for Excellence recognize the full development process of a project, not just its architecture or design. The criteria for the awards include leadership, contribution to the community, innovations, public/private partnership, environmental protection and enhancement, response to societal needs, and financial viability.

The winning Washington, D.C. project was Columbia Heights, Washington, DC (The Government of the District of Columbia): Arising from a city-led initiative to revitalize a neighborhood destroyed in the riots following Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination, Columbia Heights features 1.2 million square feet of new development, including more than 600 housing units, 650,000 square feet of large-format and community retail, and refurbished cultural and public spaces. 

Read the press release

A team from the University of Maryland was a runner-up in the prestigious 2010 Urban Land Institute (ULI) Gerald D. Hines Student Urban Design Competition.The Maryland team was one of four finalists in the competition. The other finalists were from NC State/UNC, Harvard Univeristy and the University of Pennsylvania. The students on the team are: Gregory Patrick Vernon, Master of Urban Studies and Planning; Lin Mao, Master of Architecture; Brian H. Brodeur, Master of Architecture; Kameron Aroom, Master of Landscape Architecture; and Timothy Martin Phillips, Master of Real Estate Development. The Faculty Advisor for the project is Matthew Bell.

The ULI Gerald D. Hines Student Urban Design Competition was created in 2003 to encourage cooperation and teamwork–necessary talents in the planning, design and development of sustainable communities–among future land use professionals and allied professions, such as architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, historic preservation, engineering, real estate development, finance, psychology and law.

Nearly 660 students comprising 132 teams from 48 universities in the U.S. and Canada applied to compete in the 2010 competition. They were challenged to create a design and development proposal for a 73.5 acre site in East Village in downtown San Diego. East Village, one of eight distinct neighborhoods in the city’s downtown area, spans a total area of 1,450 acres bound by Interstate 5 and the San Diego Bay. Students were asked to develop a transformative vision for East Village and incorporate the highest and best sustainable use, new economic development activities, and evidence of market support for their development activities – all fused with financial justification for their design decisions.

The links below provide more information on the competition, and the team submissions.

View Maryland's Finalist Stage submission

View Maryland's Competition Stage submission 

Read the press release