On Tuesday, February 18 ASLA participated in the Future City Finals Awards Celebration which welcomed over 46 middle and high school teams — selected from more than 75,000 participants — that presented their innovative solutions to this year’s challenge: designing a floating city.

With a special focus on reaching girls, and under-represented and under-served students, the Future City Competition combines the engineer design process (EDP) with project management to imagine, research, design, and build cities of the future.

As the first and only design group represented in the international STEM competition, ASLA has been a Special Award Sponsor since 2018, and we were thrilled to join engineering leaders, Future City supporters, and the DiscoverE board of directors and staff at the annual awards ceremony.

This year, the ASLA Special Award for Design-Centered Solutions with Nature went to the Downingtown Middle School in Philadelphia, PA. The team of students won for their city named Salacia.

Teams were responsible for producing five deliverables including:

• A Project Plan – where students complete a four-part plan to help them organize their project,
• A City Essay – in which teams have 1,500 words to describe their futuristic city and solutions to the Climate Change challenge,
• A City Model – with only a $100 budget, teams creatively repurpose recycled materials to build a scale model of their city,
• A City Presentation and Q&A session– where teams have up to seven minutes to present their city.

Potomac Chapter members Chloe Gillespie (LandDesign), ASLA, Alison Kennedy (Kelly Design Group), ASLA, and Xingye Pan (HOK), ASLA met with talented young innovators from around the world to hear their creative ideas, and judge ASLA’s Special Award for Design-Centered Solutions with Nature.

Watch the ASLA Special Award announcement here (starts at 1:01:17).

About the Future City Competition

The Future City Competition is a program of DiscoverE, a nonprofit dedicated to providing global resources, programs, and connections between K-12 students and engineers and STEM professionals.

Open to sixth, seventh, and eighth grade students around the world, the Future City Competition starts with a question – how can we make the world a better place?

Of more than 45,000 Future City participants:

48% of participants are girls.
39% of participating students are from underrepresented populations.
43% of participating schools are Title I schools.

For questions about ASLA’s sponsorship of the Future City Competition or how you can become a mentor to a team, contact Lisa J. Jennings, Senior Manager, Career Discovery and Diversity.