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Each year, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Energy Star program honors businesses and organizations that have made outstanding contributions to protecting the environment through superior energy achievements. Energy Star Award Winners lead their industries in the production and sale of energy-efficient products and services, and in the development and adoption of strategies that provide substantial savings in the buildings where people work and live. This year, five ULI Greenprint members achieved Energy Star Partner of the Year.

A redevelopment plan for a Cincinnati site presented by a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University has taken top honors in the 2019 ULI Hines Student Competition, an ideas competition that provides graduate students the opportunity to devise a comprehensive design and development scheme for a large-scale site in an urban area.

Internationally acclaimed artist and urban planner Theaster Gates, whose rise to prominence began with his use of art and culture to revive underserved neighborhoods in his hometown of Chicago, was named the 2018 recipient of the ULI J.C. Nichols Prize for Visionaries in Urban Development at the Institute’s 2018 Fall Meeting in Boston. Gates spoke with Urban Landabout his work, his career, and the guiding principles that motivate him.

Whether making or adapting a building, district, campus, city, workspace, portfolio of properties, brand, or lifestyle, the human experience is central. Three examples from the United States and Canada illuminate how our cities are everyday places—small and forgotten places—waiting to be discovered and transformed into human-oriented social places.

The conversion to primarily open-office floor plans over the past decade is now reaching adolescence, and like many revolutions has created problems as well as possibilities, panelists said at a ULI New York event in February.

While Atlanta has grown rapidly in the last decade, the downtown area lacks green space. A ULI Advisory Services panel was asked to study a proposal to build a highway lid that would provide park space downtown.

At ULI Arizona’s Trends Day in January, panelists talked about how revitalized public spaces—starting with parks and libraries but also including alleys, sidewalks, and roads—are helping make neighborhoods walkable and desirable.

Better collaboration and integration for design and construction, combined with more building off site and using new technology and collective metrics to innovate, show promise in reducing the cost of construction, said panelists speaking at the ULI Arizona Trends Day held recently in Phoenix.

A San Francisco developer imports Chinese steel modules to install 22 units of graduate student housing in only four days.