Urban SOS 2017TM: hOUR City

Description

THE CHALLENGE

Overview

hOUR City, this year’s Urban SOS student ideas competition, calls for multidisciplinary teams to focus on challenges associated with three deeply intertwined systems — housing, transportation, and economic development — that fundamentally influence the quality of life in a given region. Teams should propose design, planning, policy, and other strategies that address unequal access to opportunity by offering people better options for where to live, how to move around, and how to make a living.

The challenge asks you to imagine:

•  Multidisciplinary approaches that marry design, planning, business, engineering, policy, or other kinds of expertise to produce strategies that could increase the production or preservation of high-quality affordable housing.
• How increased mobility can offer greater access to jobs, affordable housing, markets, services (e.g., healthcare, education), and other opportunities or resources.
• Economic development strategies that can be broadened to offer opportunities to a wider range of people (e.g., with limited skills and education; living in remote, rural areas).
• A combination of housing, transportation, or economic development strategies that complement each other to improve people’s quality of life.

CITIES, INTERVENTIONS, AND SITES

You and your team may focus on any housing, transportation, or economic development-related challenge facing one of the cities identified within the 100 Resilient Cities network and its surrounding region.

All proposals must include a physical intervention to the selected housing, transportation, or economic development challenge. Physical interventions may include new buildings, landscapes, infrastructural components, or other elements of the built environment; they may also comprise changes to existing buildings, landscapes, infrastructure, or other elements of the built environment. Students are encouraged to propose policy strategies, new business models, and a wide range of other solutions to address their selected challenge, but these solutions must be accompanied by a physical intervention at a specific site or sites identified by the team.