Karson Hegrenes

My name is Karson (he/him) and I’m passionate about active transportation. I want to dedicate my career to shaping a greener, safer, and more just built environment that centers human-scale mobility while emphasizing the needs of underserved communities. Currently, I’m a Masters of Urban Planning and Policy student at the University of Illinois Chicago specializing in transportation. In my free time I enjoy bike camping, playing guitar, and growing my music collection.

Growing up in suburban communities, spending time in cities was often a novel experience for me. I was always so intrigued by how cities came to be, why cities were placed where they were, and why they looked how they did. What I didn’t understand at the time was the vocabulary for this fascination – the social science of geography. In my free time in school, I would pore over all the maps in my social studies textbooks and memorize all the largest cities around the world. I would draw made-up elaborate city grids on notebook paper. In a sense, I was always idealizing urban environments – before I knew what urban planning was, I was doing it in my imagination.

I also spent a lot of time outdoors in my youth. Living in Southeastern Wisconsin, I would spend my summers out on my bike. I would ride around nearby neighborhoods with my friends and catch frogs, swim in lakes, and venture into the woods until our parents expected us to come home for dinner. My bike was a token of freedom to me – with it, I could go on my own adventures and explore the world around me. I felt like a character in a Pokemon game, riding around and surrounding myself with nature, going on a big adventure. At the time, I didn’t realize it, but the built environment around us wasn’t so accommodating for a bunch of ten year-olds on bikes.

Upon moving to St. Paul, Minnesota for college, I came to realize that these two passions of mine – urban environments and biking – had a complicated relationship in the United States. Taking geography and urban studies classes, I learned about the history of housing and transportation policy in the United States and how that shaped the built environment to be overtly hostile to people on bikes. I learned about the sociology of car use and the predominance of car culture, and how politically difficult it is to introduce alternatives. I learned about the long-term economic and environmental issues of continued societal dependence on the automobile. And I learned that things can be different.

Now a Master of Urban Planning and Policy student at the University of Illinois Chicago, I am pursuing the knowledge and experience to quite literally change the world – that is, change the built environment – so that our cities become much more hospitable places; so that people may have the freedom not to rely on a car; so that we as a society can live more in harmony with nature; so that people can spend time outdoors in a welcoming environment; and so that more young people can imagine beautiful spaces and have their own adventures.