ASCE Sustainable Solutions Competition

About the competition

The ASCE Sustainable Solutions Competition challenges students to develop a stronger understanding of sustainability and learn to incorporate sustainable solutions into everyday problems that engineers may encounter. Students are encouraged to be creative in their solutions and use all resources available.

2024 Topic

The fictional City of ASCE is well known for its early 20th Century waterfront and manufacturing hub on the Big Brown River to support the budding industrial economy at the time. However, a decline and abandonment of the riverfront has since occurred. The City is seeking proposals to revitalize and redevelop three parcels of the waterfront area using the Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure’s Envision framework to meet the City sustainability goals.

Rules and RFIs

The rules of this competition are intended to simulate a request for proposal (RFP) that responds to a real-world challenge. The purpose of this rules document is to provide students with a proposal scenario, existing conditions, and goals that should be achieved in proposal submissions. The guidelines are intentionally general and encourage teams to rely on creativity to achieve all planning and design elements. Student teams should read these rules thoroughly and seek clarifications as necessary.

The competition provides a “Requests for Information (RFI)” period so that student teams can ask questions about the rules as needed. See the rules for where and when to send RFIs as well as how to access the responses. The ASCE Sustainable Solutions Competition Rules were revised on October 27, 2023.  The ASCE Sustainable Solutions Competition Rules Appendix A were revised on February 2, 2024.

View the revised 2024 rules (PDF)

View Rules Appendix A Revised February 2024 – Existing Site Drawing (PDF)

Upload letter of intent