What Makes A $50,000 Idea?
In an interview with 2021 ULI Hines Winner, Frances Grout-Brown, she shares her story about how she got into urban planning, her team’s project “Fusion”, and her advice for future city builders.
The Urban Land Institute (ULI)’s Hines Student Competition is a prestigious ideas competition that offers graduate-level students an opportunity to create a development proposal for a real, large-scale site in a North American city. Multidisciplinary teams, each consisting of five students in at least three different programs, would compete to win a US$50,000 prize.
Frances Grout-Brown is the team leader of this year’s winning project submission, “Fusion”. Frances is a recent graduate with a Master of Planning in Urban Development from Ryerson University. She is also the Executive Member of RUaPlanner, a student-led initiative that brings interactive city-building activities to high school students across Toronto. I had the pleasure of organizing the 1UP Toronto Conference with Frances earlier this year, and was excited to learn that she was participating in the ULI Hines Student Competition.
After finding out that her team had won at the finals, I reached out to Frances and asked if she could share her story to inspire the next generation of changemakers in our city. Here’s what I learned from her:
Angela: A large part of what we do at Urban Minds is to introduce the disciplines of urban planning and architecture to high school students. How did you come across urban planning? How did you decide to pursue that as a career after being in business and accounting for six years?
Frances: I came across urban planning a bit later in my career. It wasn’t really a career path that I was exposed to as a teenager. I started to become more aware of it as a career option in my last year of university and then through a friend who did her masters in urban planning. I realized that I have always been curious about the spaces around me, how people use them, and how they came to be. I was also working in an NGO with a lot of partner organizations worldwide, and I really enjoyed that aspect of the job getting to know different contexts and people. I decided that I wanted to combine what I was able to learn so far in my career and apply it in a more on-the-ground and people-oriented setting that is [urban] planning.
A: Many of our participants and volunteers would agree with you that they wished they had known more about urban planning as a career at a younger age. I’d say it seems like you’ve definitely made the right career move — congratulations on winning the ULI Hines Competition! Can you share a little bit about your team’s project Fusion?
F: Thanks a lot for the congratulations! Fusion is an affordable and mixed-use development that aims to meaningfully reconnect surrounding districts and neighbourhoods inside and outside of the Loop (highway loop that surrounds the site and the downtown core in Kansas City, MO). The site is designed around two key pillars: connectivity and resilience. Physical and social connectivity are promoted using active transportation, public open space, affordable housing, and key social infrastructure. Through an extensive stormwater management system and creating spaces to build on existing skills and networks within the local food system, we aimed to also achieve environmental and economic resilience.
A: A unique aspect of your team’s proposal is an urban agriculture hub which provides space for research, farming, small-scale distribution, and local business incubation. Do you see this as a potential opportunity for other North American cities to implement?
F: Yes definitely! In our research we came across a lot of interesting projects in these areas already happening in Kansas City, Detroit, New York City, etc. I think the pandemic has really made more people aware of the importance of food security and supporting community organizations that are involved in the local food system. There also seems to be more momentum with different actors involved in development connecting over the topic of urban agriculture, one recently being a talk and report put out by ULI Toronto at the end of March.
A: Providing affordable housing is an increasingly important consideration for cities, and your team managed to include 30% of the housing units in your project as affordable housing. Even though we hear the term “affordable housing” all the time, can you define what that means? What was your team’s motivation behind going above and beyond the minimum requirement of 20% affordable housing in Kansas City?
F: Like you mentioned, “affordable housing” is a blanket term that we see everywhere now, but can mean a lot of different things. I think it really depends on how it’s defined locally. Therefore it was important for us to understand what Kansas City (KC) means by “affordable” and what the different levels of affordable are there. For the team, it was also not solely about reaching the 30% but also making sure that there is deeper affordability, especially around the major transit station to ensure equitable access to transit. So, we based our affordability target off of the different scales in the KC housing strategy and policies to focus on housing for what they define as the lower-income population. We also felt that without the 30% we wouldn’t be able to achieve our vision for the site.
A: From watching your team’s final presentation, I know that your team used personas in your design process. How did the use of personas guide your team’s design thinking? Can you share some examples?
F: Showing examples and short stories about how different people used the space helped us to really think about who the space is for, who was missing, and also what we wanted to prioritize, since it was such a short amount of time to develop this proposal. The examples we used aimed to show how the site would create access to key amenities within a 10-minute radius that can significantly enhance a resident’s quality of life within KC. Some examples include: a cook from the neighbouring community using the bike paths to easily access the low-cost kitchen space to build up her business; a resident that just secured an affordable unit that cuts their commute time to work downtown in half, and then a municipal employee picking up dinner after work before picking up his daughter who plays basketball at the community center. Communicating how people use the designed space was really helpful for us in bringing our proposal to life and picturing the different experiences that could happen in and to/from the site.
A: A lot of our readers may be thinking about postsecondary education applications and exploring different career options. What’s unique about the ULI Hines Competition is that participants like you have the opportunity to work in a multidisciplinary team with other students from various backgrounds in architecture, real estate and infrastructure, urban design, and urban planning. Can you share how you and your teammates’ roles differed and complemented each other?
F: Learning to communicate across disciplines has been a great experience, and brought to light the different skills and perspectives that are required in real-life city building. I was really lucky to be a part of a team of really talented students from across Toronto. Ruotian, who is pursuing a Master of Urban Design at U of T, and Chenyi, who is pursuing a Master of Architecture at U of T, led the design and architecture of the site, focusing on the physical aspects of the site and bringing the team’s ideas together into structures and visuals. Yanlin is pursuing her Master of Real Estate and Infrastructure at York, and she led the creation of our pro forma, one of the most challenging aspects of the competition of making sure our ideas were financially feasible. Leorah and I were responsible for the planning aspect: focusing on Kansas CIty plans and policy, thinking about the human experience within the site and how to connect to surrounding neighbourhoods. We needed to work together and communicate often to make sure our vision and narrative was consistent with the design and financials.
A: Finally, what advice would you give to high school students who may be thinking about these career options, including architecture, real estate and infrastructure, urban design, and urban planning?
F: One of my professors gave me the advice of walking around your neighbourhood and really taking the time to think about what you enjoy about a space and why, and then noting these down. My advice would be to think about this and also what kind of learning you enjoy, and see how that fits into different programs being offered around these different career paths. It’s also great that now there are initiatives connecting youth to city-building projects, like Urban Minds, so I would also encourage students to learn about what they do and participate when they can. I remember it being really hard to decide as a teenager what to study and apply for; you and your interests will change over time as you get to experience different things, so don’t put too much pressure on yourself trying to pick a career path at a young age. The good thing about these professions is that they are complementary, build on each other, and use other skills from other industries, so you can reposition into these later on too.
A: Those are truly great words of advice for our students and thank you for the Urban Minds shout-out!
If you’re curious to learn more about the world of city building, check out Urban Minds’ youth leadership program, 1UP Toronto.
