Urban Design
Jeff Speck and I first met in 2004. I had just been elected mayor of Oklahoma City, and I was invited to Charleston for an event hosted by the Mayors’ Institute on City Design. Jeff was one of the design professionals lending expertise to mayors facing complex planning issues.
When I took office as mayor of Oklahoma City in 2004, my goals were similar to any other mayor’s: to improve our economy, raise our national profile, and protect our citizens. We had an intersection with safety concerns, and our planning department was pushing the idea to me and the City Council to install a traffic circle. At the time, traffic circles were new to this generation of Oklahoma City drivers, but we soon found out that they were cost-effective and most certainly safer.
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Can third spaces help downtowns bounce back from the pandemic?
Marshall Bennett Institute of Real Estate was awarded first place in the graduate division of the 13th annual Harold E. Eisenberg Foundation Real Estate Challenge, which culminated with final presentations in April at the offices of Holland & Knight, 150 N. Riverside Plaza in Chicago.
Four teams, representing Harvard University, the University of Virginia, and the University of California, Berkeley, have been selected as finalists in the 21st annual ULI Gerald D. Hines Student Urban Design Competition, an event that challenges teams of graduate students to devise a comprehensive design and development plan for a real-world urban site.
Growth pours north out of Dallas, the city nicknamed “the Big D,” and one result has been a boom in the suburb of Frisco, which earned the title of the nation’s fastest-growing city of the 2010s, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Frisco’s growth has spread to nearby Celina, which has grown 10x since 2010.
Six developments from around the world have been selected as winners of the 2022 ULI Global Awards for Excellence. This year’s winners include two from North America, two from Europe, and two from the Asia Pacific region.
As climate change worsens and the intensity of extreme weather–related events increases, meeting modern building codes may not be enough. Municipalities, nonprofit organizations, and industry groups are developing climate resilience design standards and tools, some of which are required or incentivized for publicly funded projects, and others of which may become expected or required for commercial real estate transactions.
Atlanta has a deluge of existing 1980s, 1990s and 2000s-vintage office space, and there’s an opportunity to make these buildings more efficient and better for the environment.
Suburban greenfield projects fade away as stakeholders focus on connecting cities and reinvesting in areas with preexisting infrastructure and transit.
Ensuring inclusion and access to all, embodying Hong Kong’s societal values and global identity, safeguarding Hong Kong’s heritage for future generations, and committing to sustainability are among some of the ideas suggested in a new ULI report on how a Hong Kong harbor development can best serve the local community.
In Denver’s Lower Downtown (LoDo) neighborhood, an interesting addition to the urban fabric has emerged over the past five years in the form of activated streets and alleyways that serve as a connective tissue for art, entertainment, culture, and gathering. In early October, ULI Colorado’s Building Healthy Places committee hosted a panel to discuss our new age of activated alleyways.
Successful development of 20-minute communities in Black and brown neighborhoods requires community involvement and ownership, according to panelists who explored the topic at ULI’s 2021 Fall Meeting.
Making cities such as New Orleans more child-friendly requires rethinking mobility infrastructure, providing more access to public transit, and bringing together a variety of stakeholders—including young people—into the planning process, according to panelists on the “Child-Friendly New Orleans: Designing the Future” concurrent session at the 2021 ULI Fall Meeting in Chicago.
Jonathan Rose, center, in conversation with Commissioner of the Chicago Department Planning and Development Maurice Cox, and Rebuild Foundation executive director Theaster Gates Jr. Rose, a long-time ULI Trustee, is founder and president of New York-based Jonathan Rose Companies, a national mission-driven real estate development, planning and investment firm. Rose Companies has long been a leader in green building practices, and enhancing the social, health and educational opportunities for residents through its Communities of Opportunity programming.
With features such as mezzanine offices above warehouse spaces and shared-amenity areas in which people can exercise and socialize, developers are transforming the once-staid genre of industrial buildings by incorporating features comparable to those typically found in office and mixed-use projects, according to a recent ULI panel discussion. Panelists also described design changes made to facilitate the increasingly rapid movement of e-commerce goods and rooftop solar installations that can supply most of a building’s energy needs.
Washington, D.C., can advance the recovery of the business, tourist, and neighborhood activity in its central business district (CBD) through multiple community-led initiatives, according to a new ULI report, based on the first ULI Virtual Advisory Services panel (vASP).
Between January and March 2021, Urban Landpublished a series of articles chronicling the efforts of member-led task forces organized by ULI district councils in Chicago, Phoenix, Sacramento, and Tampa to address local policy and regulatory barriers to creation of healthier and more equitable places. These initiatives were part of ULI’s District Council Task Force for Health and Social Equity Project.
The mayor of Paris is embracing the ville du quart d’heure—translated as 15-minute city—the first time that a leading politician in France’s largest city had backed the idea, particularly as a reelection strategy.
Though working from home has moved higher on the occupier agenda as the Asia Pacific region copes with the ongoing global pandemic, office space is adapting to the changing environment.
Chicago tops the list of U.S. cities with the most adaptive-use apartment buildings, whereas New York City is home to the most converted apartment units in total.
Three San Francisco developers discuss focusing on “what would work” in order to create the city’s Mission Bay mixed-use development, during the WLI session at the 2020 ULI Virtual Fall Meeting
Anthony “Tony” Williams, who served as the mayor of Washington, D.C., from 1999 to 2007, has been awarded the 2020 ULI Prize for Visionaries in Urban Development.
This summer, Urban Land is profiling online and in print each finalist for 2020’s ULI Urban Open Space Award. The winner(s) will be announced in the fall. Learn more about award-winning and innovative open-space projects as part of the 2020 ULI Virtual Fall Meeting.
A tall mixed-use tower without parking replaces a small Philadelphia parking lot, while its multimodal urban passageway connects two streets.
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An international study assesses and compares 21 leading global business districts, confirming that business districts in western Europe and North America continue to lead the way amid fierce competition from Asian business districts, but all will need to adapt for the future in response to the COVID-19 crisis. Business districts in Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore, and Beijing all ranked in the top 10 in this year’s study.
“Cities need to grow to thrive,” Dan Doctoroff said. “But we can’t take growth for granted.” Doctoroff is the chairman and CEO of Sidewalk Labs, a subsidiary of Google parent Alphabet. Doctoroff was speaking at the 2020 ULI Europe Conference.
Members of ULI Europe’s Technology and Real Estate Product Council discuss the new council’s areas of focus, approaches to evaluating and implementing new technologies, ways to improve understanding between technology startups and the real estate industry, promising current and future technologies, and related trends.
By the end of 2019, the first families will move into new, million-dollar townhouses at Edge-on-Hudson, a $1 billion development that will eventually bring more than a thousand new residences to Sleepy Hollow, New York.
In June, a group of 125 of Denver’s public-, private-, and nonprofit-sector leaders came to study Copenhagen’s brand of sustainable urbanism with the Denver Downtown Partnership (DDP) Urban Exploration program. The DDP study group included 61 members of ULI Colorado, Denver Mayor Michael B. Hancock, several Denver City Council members, and city and county staff members. The study tour explored the city of Copenhagen “through three lenses: livability, equity, and economic innovation, in which growth goes hand-in-hand with quality of life,” said one official.
