Canton Students Imagine Future City with Revolving Downtown

A spinning central business district is key to a model Future City imagined by a group of students from Crescent Academy International in Canton.

The school sent two teams to the 2014 Future City event, held Monday at the Suburban Collection Showplace in Novi. They competed with 17 other public school, private school and homeschooled teams in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) competition. This year's theme: “Tomorrow’s Transit: Design A Way To Move People In And Around Your City.”

While neither team placed, students said they learned a lot from preparing for and presenting during the event. 

Areesha Hasan, 12, Amina Hafeez, 13, and Amirah Aabed, 12, said they represented a class of students who designed and built their model city. The spinning downtown serves as an energy-generating windmill, provides a tourist attraction and employs most of their town's residents, the students said. 

"Our school has been in the competition for three years," Hafeez said. "We care about our community, and (Future City) is giving us students a chance to build a better city." 

In another section of the competition, Sara Siddiqui, 13, Musa Haydar, 12, and Sarah Raza, 12, presented their model city to judges. Siddiqui said the competition leads kids to start thinking about and preparing for the world they'll live in as adults. 

"The competition as a whole encourages the fact that anyone can affect the future," Haydar said. 

Raza said Future City participation has inspired her to think about a career in engineering, because she has seen all the different aspects of the field.

"And it helps you make new friends," she added.