ASU Students Awarded 3 Local and National Awards for Community Engagement Work
“Students connected to ASU’s Master of Urban and Environmental Planning (MUEP) program are the recipients of three local and national awards for their socially embedded projects, with the two most recent honors awarded Thursday. The projects were part of the students’ capstone experience in the program, Planning Workshop.
“By assessing each situation and considering planning best practices, our students are able to not only propose ideas for what ‘should be,’ but vet those ideas through conversations with the local community as a whole,” said Meagan Ehlenz, an associate professor in ASU’s School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning, who teaches the semesterlong course. “They understand it’s not enough to recommend future changes, but they must also foster community ownership of that change.”
These graduate students focused their capstone MUEP experience on solving real-world planning challenges with community partners in Arizona during the spring 2024 semester. Three teams won awards for their contributions to urban and environmental planning. They are:
- The Western Planner Award for Best Student Project: Chandler team. Awarded Aug. 8 in Cheyenne, Wyoming.
- American Planning Association, Arizona chapter, for Student Planning Project: town of Miami team. This and the following were awarded Thursday in Tucson.
- American Planning Association, Arizona chapter, Honorable Mention for Student Planning Project: Phoenix team.
These awards represent the graduate program’s commitment to providing real-world, hands-on learning opportunities, while simultaneously positively impacting local communities; the student work is going beyond the classroom to help shape a more sustainable future for Arizona.
Two of the three projects represent the continuation of partnerships between ASU and local communities through Project Cities, a program of the Sustainable Cities Network in ASU’s Global Futures Laboratory. Project Cities connects community partners facing sustainability challenges to ASU faculty to develop solutions through project-based learning with their students. Project Cities was awarded the ASU President’s Medal for Social Embeddedness in 2022 and has facilitated more than 110 projects with communities across Arizona.” (Marshall Terrill, ASU News)
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