A team comprising students from U of T, York and Ryerson won top prize at the annual Urban Land Institute/ Gerald D. Hines Hines Student Competition with a design that focused heavily on sustainability and community use (image courtesy of team)
Student design team wins prestigious international competition
Published: May 25, 2021
A team of Canadian students, including two from the University of Toronto, recently took home top prize in the Urban Land Institute/ Gerald D. Hines Hines Student Competition – the first time a non-American team has won the prestigious contest.
Ruotian Tan, a master of urban design student, and Chenyi Xu, a master of architecture student, were both members of the winning team, which also included students from York University and Ryerson University.
“It was a great multidisciplinary learning experience for me,” Tan said earlier this year. “It was a very good chance for me to practice and get some good results before I actually go into a professional career.”
The annual competition asks entrants to find a solution to a complex urban design problem – in this case, by developing master plans for the East Village, a neighbourhood in Kansas City, Mo. More than 100 teams from the U.S., Singapore and Canada competed for the US$50,000 prize.
The Canadian team “pushed a new paradigm for an urban neighborhood based on the strong regional legacy of agriculture,” ULI Hines jury chair Diana Reid wrote in a statement. “Their financing plan and design enabled economic resilience through small scale food growth and distribution, local culinary incubation, and research-driven employment opportunities.”
