Urban Design
Online video game competitions are moving out of the basement—and taking hold as the new professional sport.
“There is great confusion about what the future will be,” legendary architect Jan Gehl said at ULI Europe’s Real Estate Forum in Copenhagen in June.
Reflections on a storied, globe-spanning career—and thoughts on today’s Hong Kong.
Nashville’s new boutique hotels capitalize on a sometimes bawdy history, art and artifacts—and even a fictional persona.
ULI will hold its 2019 Spring Meeting April 16–18 at the Music City Center in Nashville. A major focus of the gathering will be the ongoing evolution of urban areas into thriving places that are drawing talented workers and businesses and are magnets for investment. The Nashville metropolitan area, which has experienced an extraordinary renaissance and significant growth over the past several years, is a prime example of this movement.
With rising demand for small cohousing units, developers in Asia embrace the for-rent market.
Millennials living in the nation’s capital and its close-in suburbs can be characterized as “committed urbanists,” according to a just-released ULI Washington survey. This new study, which updated a 2015 survey, included more households with children—an increase from 12 to 20 percent. Almost half (49 percent) of respondents are married or partnered—up from 39 percent in 2015. Homeownership has increased from 28 to 33 percent. And median income has increased over 11 percent, exceeding the national growth rate.
A new online Public Infrastructure Decision Tree provides guidance to state and local government officials.
A decade in the making, the South Boston waterfront neighborhood is emerging as a preferred destination for commercial and residential tenants.
What could the future of cities look like? In the future, cities will have more in common, and will have more interaction with each other than with regional governments, said speakers at ULI Germany’s Urban Leader Summit in May. This “parasovereignty” can already be seen in places such as Dubai, where some cities use different systems of law to attract investment.
Rather than being siloed as strictly transportation initiatives, urban mobility projects and policies are increasingly being viewed in part as economic investment. London is a prime example of this approach, said experts speaking at the ULI Netherlands Conference in May.
A national developer transforms a faded Texas strip center into a mixed-use place around a central urban street.
Nestled in a relatively quiet East Amsterdam neighborhood, a new kind of hotel has been racking up occupancy rates topping 90 percent for the past two years. Zoku is a modern take on the extended-stay hotel, where the visitors stay in fully outfitted micro-hotel rooms of 260 or 320 square feet (24 or 30 sq m) and relax and connect in the common areas on the top floor.
How can the real estate industry do a better job of meeting the needs of middle-income renters and buyers?
A ULI Advisory Services panel was asked to focus on Beijing’s Qianmen East, a 56-hectare (138 ac) hutongneighborhood, consisting of interlinked communities of low-rise courtyard homes aligned in sequence along narrow alleys.
A panel of experts at a ULI Washington event said that thriving suburbs will continue to become more walkable and dense where appropriate, with fewer big-box stores surrounded by parking lots.
In fall 2016, about 100 residents, business owners, and public officials came together to discuss the Franklin Canal in El Paso, Texas, the adjacent neighborhoods, and an opportunity to connect them: a proposed Active Transportation System (ATS) funded by the El Paso Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO). These community members were participating in an ULI Advisory Services panel, a weeklong workshop convened to develop a strategy for the “International Beltway” portion of the ATS.
In February, ULI South Florida/Caribbean gathered a panel of researchers, real estate developers, and economic development agencies at the new Arts & Entertainment District—the latest neighborhood to emerge as a cultural destination for city residents.
ULI will hold its 2018 Spring Meeting May 1–3 at the Cobo Center in Detroit. A major focus for this year’s gathering will be the reinvention of urban areas into thriving places that are drawing talented workers and becoming magnets for investment.
During my time as ULI’s global chief executive officer, it has become increasingly clear to me that one of the great attributes of the Institute is its ability to embrace change and evolve without losing sight of its core values. After eight very rewarding and fulfilling years at the helm, it’s time for me to step down.
Can the city create a healthier, less automobile-centric environment by closing more streets to traffic?
The Chicago Riverwalk, which reused derelict infrastructure, is a 1.25-mile-long (2 km) civic space between Lake Michigan and the confluence of the Main Stem, North Branch, and South Branch of the Chicago River. This reinvention of urban life is at the heart of a new chapter for Chicago in which public space becomes a gathering ground for residents. Providing sweeping views and new connectivity, this civic amenity reunites the river and the city.
Technological innovations are affecting nearly every facet of how societies function, but it is the corresponding evolution of human behavior—not the technology itself—that is driving how the next generation of cities around the globe is being built. That was the general feeling of a panel of large-scale developers—veritable city builders—assembled at the World Real Estate Forum by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for Real Estate.
In 2003, Andrew B. Turner was a senior at Berkeley High School in Berkeley, California, when a new interactive program that challenged students to create a development scenario for a local neighborhood made its debut. Nearly 15 years later, Turner is now a project director at Argent LLP, one of London’s most respected developers.
Demographic changes taking root today will affect society and the built environment for decades to come, according to Eike Wenzel, managing partner of the Institut für Trend- und Zukunftsforschung. He spoke about what cities can do to anticipate and adapt to these changes at the ULI Germany 2017 Urban Leader Summit in Frankfurt.
In the Pacific Northwest, real estate development continues to be powered by a strong and expanding technology sector, where companies like Facebook are taking upward of 1 million square feet (93,000 sq m) of space in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood, doubling its footprint in the city, while Google has leased several hundred thousand square feet of space nearby.
Cranes fill the sky and construction crews complicate navigation through Seattle’s streets as development projects downtown and in other close-in urban neighborhoods usher in a higher and denser city.
A Denver developer activates an alley to tie together a hotel, offices, food, and “maker” retail on the site of a former dairy.
Cities and suburbs are natural places for designs inspired by natural systems, according The Permaculture City by Toby Hemenway, a guidebook to permaculture design in the concrete jungle. “Permaculture design is turning out to be beautifully suited to urban contexts,” says Hemenway.
Resort developers are coming up with new ways to create allure in urban locations—where they can’t rely on beaches, golf, or skiing to attract fickle travelers.
