While you won’t find much more than a view of cornfields on a drive from Chicago to Champaign-Urbana, the cities’ culture and diversity have made them stand out of the Midwestern farmland as one of the best college towns in the country.

For many students in the department of landscape architecture, it’s the blend of urban and rural landscapes in the cities that attract people to the cities.

“One of the things for me that I like is that you have Green Street up there with a lot of commercial attraction, but then also you have a really nice huge campus that’s right adjacent to that,” said Sam Stuber, junior in FAA. “There are quieter spaces and busier spaces within a small vicinity. It’s kind of nice to have that.”

Champaign-Urbana ranked seventh overall in the American Institute of Economic Research’s list of Top 20 College Towns, which is part of the institute’s ranking of Top 75 College Cities and Towns in America.

Luke Delorme, research fellow at AIER, said the institute looked at 271 metropolitan institutional areas that had at least 10,000 students. The areas were then ranked across twelve categories.

“We basically look at each category and see how far away from average is the metropolitan institutional area and then we average those,” he said. “That is how we get the overall rank.”

The ranking focuses on four categories that are then divided into 12 criteria: student life, which looks at student concentration, cost of housing and city accessibility; culture, which looks at arts and leisure concentration, international student population and percentage of workers in innovative fields; economic health, which looks at unemployment rate, entrepreneurial activity and brain drain or gain; and opportunity, which looks at research and development per student, amount of college educated people in the town and earning potential.

“The way that we selected the 12 categories, in a way, is just our feeling of how to get our best picture of what is a good community in which to attend college,” Delorme said. “All those make up what we think is sort of a well-rounded area for the school.”

Delorme said the goal of the ranking is to find which town contributes the most to the college experience. The institute does not focus on individual colleges, he said, but on the community and how it supports students. They also consider how the university fits in with the community.

Don Gerard, mayor of Champaign, said the cities offer a variety of opportunities to students and visitors.

“The big things are opportunities. The fact that we do have great places to be, great entertainment, great night life and if you stay here long enough, it’s a great place to start a family,” Gerard said. “We have great schools. There’s top public transportation. We’re a sustainable city … There’s so much here.”

Delorme said Champaign-Urbana ranked highly in several categories; specifically, the cities ranked second in international student population and fifth in city accessibility.

According to data compiled for the list, 15 percent of people in Champaign-Urbana take public transportation to work, whereas Delorme said many college towns have less than 10 percent of people doing so.

“The strength of the design of our community is, as it is close to the campus core, the downtown is relatively dense and walkable,” said William Sullivan, associate head of the department of landscape architecture. “We have good opportunities for mass transit with the MTD bus system. Also, there has been an investment in bicycles. I think that’s incredibly important because it brings people outdoors, it puts people on the streets, it’s very healthy, and it connects neighbors with each other.”

Another factor playing into the University’s high rank is the number of different arts and leisure events offered to the community.

At the University and in the cities, people have the opportunity to attend events at museums, galleries and sports events. Champaign-Urbana ranked 17th for its concentration of arts and leisure establishments.

Gerard said the entertainment events in Champaign are closely related to those at the University.

“You see things melding in. The Krannert Center for Performing Arts, of course, is a world class facility. But then you’ll see that become part of the Pygmalion Music Festival, which also extends all the way to downtown and crosses lots of genres and age groups and audience,” Gerard said. “It’s phenomenal — we’re truly blessed with all the music and art and theater we have around here. It just becomes ingrained in a part of the whole fabric of our whole community, not just the University.”

Urbana Mayor Laurel Prussing said having a large university in the area helps draw visitors to the community from all over the world.

“We have market at the square in the summer time; there’s music offered there, as well as fruits and vegetables and all kinds of foods, and we even started offering wine from Illinois producers. That draws people from many miles around,” Prussing said. “We have all kinds of different festivals from time to time — the Sweet Corn Festival is probably the oldest and most well known in Urbana.

Sullivan said these types of artistic events help bring people together in a shared experience that leads them to talk and bond, creating a sense of community that blends students and locals.

Jane can be reached at [email protected].