High School Students Enter Planning 101

"Building a city -- even if it's with LEGOS -- isn't easy. Students at Las Lomas High School in Walnut Creek, CA, learned this lesson this fall while redesigning the fictional neighborhood of Elmwood as part of a class project. Las Lomas High School joined a growing roster of schools around the country teaching students the ins and outs of city planning through lessons developed by the nonprofit Urban Land Institute and UC Berkeley."

"In the process, all students learned about property taxes, zoning and absorption rates, which in this case have nothing to do with paper towels and everything to do with the time it takes to fill space in a condominium or a business park."

"Just like developers competing for a city contract, they were grilled by a panel on their choice of retail, their exclusion or inclusion of a homeless shelter run by Grace Memorial and their use of greenspace, known in regular English as 'parks.' "