The ULI Hines Student Competition—entering its 19th year in 2021—offers graduate students the opportunity to form their own multidisciplinary teams and engage in a challenging exercise in responsible land use. Teams of five students pursuing degrees in at least three different disciplines have two weeks to devise a development program for a real, large-scale site in a North American city. Teams provide graphic boards and narratives of their proposals including designs and market-feasible financial data.

This is an ideas competition; there is no expectation that anyone will apply the submitted schemes to the site. The winning team receives $50,000 ($5,000 of it goes to their university) and the finalist teams each receive $10,000. One representative from each of the four finalist teams receives an all-expenses-paid site tour in the selected competition city prior to the final presentation. All participating finalist students attend the all-expenses-paid final presentation in the host city where the jury selects the winning project. In 2021, it is very possible that both the site tour and the finals will be virtual instead of in-person.

The competition is part of the Institute’s ongoing effort to raise interest among young people in creating better communities, improving development patterns, and increasing awareness of the need for multidisciplinary solutions to development and design challenges.

Longtime ULI leader Gerald D. Hines, founder of the Hines real estate organization, created the competition with a generous endowment after he received the ULI Prize for Visionaries in Urban Development in 2002.