The Greenhill Middle School Future City Club recently competed at the 23rd North Texas Regional Future City Competition and earned a special award for building the “Most Flood Resilient City”.

Future City is a competition in which middle schoolers design a city adapted to the future. Most cities are made of all recyclable materials, like cardboard and plastic. The Future City Competition has also implemented a rule stating that a team cannot spend over $100 on materials, otherwise they will lose points. Each year, there is a theme that dictates how each city is built and the elements that it contains, and this year that theme was climate change.

The Greenhill Future City Club includes one sixth grader, three seventh graders and six eighth graders. Middle School Science Teacher and sponsor of the club, Emma DeVine, organized the team and their meetings, guiding members through the process.

“What their model and their city envisioned was Dallas in the future, built with more vertical city buildings,” DeVine said. “So instead of building out and expanding concrete, they built up incorporating more green spaces and garden spaces in those actual buildings to help mitigate the effects of the urban head island effects.”

DeVine says preparations for the competition started in September and ramped up from November to January.

Although the team did not make it to the finals, they won an award for “Most Flood Resistant City”. The award was presented by Halff Associates Inc., an engineering and architecture consulting firm.

Eighth graders Tej Sachdeva, Soraya Sachdeva and Carlos Santisteban-Conde, were the student representatives who presented the city to the judges.

Tej Sachdeva, one of the presenters, found the competition a great learning experience.

“The competition was really fun seeing other people’s ideas, and their ideas for how future cities will work,” Sachdeva said. “It was very interesting to learn how other school thought of the goal this year.”

Sachdeva also noticed a difference between Greenhill and the other teams at the competition.

“Other teams went 100 or 200 years into future, maybe more,” Sachdeva said. “We only went at least 50 [years].”

The Greenhill team competed in the competition on Jan. 28 with their city titled Dallas Future City.

“I’m really proud of [the students] for going through this process,” DeVine said. “It was not an easy one.”