A team of graduate students representing the University of Maryland took top honours at the 2014 ULI Gerald D. Hines Student Urban Design Competition with its winning plan to redevelop a Nashville neighborhood as a healthy community.

An ideas competition, the ULI Hines program is designed to simulate an actual urban design and development scenario.

The 2014 competition was based on a hypothetical situation in which the site owners had asked for a proposal that transforms the historic Sulphur Dell neighborhood. As part of ULI’s Building Healthy Places Initiative, the 2014 competition asked the student teams to submit a development proposal that would promote healthy living for the residents of Sulphur Dell. Learn more about the site and download the 2014 competition brief.

The University of Maryland’s winning design—the “Chords”—proposed a partnership between the existing private owners and the State of Tennessee. The design captured the experiences of a diverse group of people brought together by regional connectors, culture, living and fitness “strings.” The “strings” are intended to strengthen the connections to downtown and surrounding communities, as well as nearby amenities such as the ballpark, waterfront, and Centennial Mall. View the team’s proposal.

As the winning team, the University of Maryland students received $50,000. They edged out teams from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Harvard University and the University of Texas at Austin, each of which received $10,000.

In 2014, 163 teams comprising 815 students from 72 universities in the United States and Canada participated in the first round of the competition. Established with a generous endowment from longtime ULI leader Gerald D. Hines, the competition strives 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.