Design is the language through which the built environment communicates with people. It speaks even when we are not paying attention. We receive its message as we choose to walk into a building or to pass it by, to linger or to leave, to lose ourselves in an environment or to be overly conscious of self and space. The power of such communication is what makes it so enjoyable to present design articles in Urban Land. Excellent design is fundamental to every successful project.

Developers of master-planned communities (MPCs) must prepare for the next generation of buyers who will be more sophisticated and more discerning because they will come from urban environments, attendees were told at the 2017 ULI Spring Meeting.

For a city with 10.2 million trees, Toronto has a surprising lack of green space in its core. Toronto Mayor John Tory wants to change that with a 21-acre (8.5 ha) signature park. ULI Toronto convened a panel of urban-park and public-realm experts from the United States and Europe to discuss successes and challenges related to legacy parks in their own cities and the achievements the city could build on while incorporating a number of best practices into its approach.

Creative placemaking, an innovation that involves bringing art and culture in tandem with design to the beginning of a real estate development project, is gaining momentum around the globe, from small rural communities to large urban areas.

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.

Hines is widely known for building glass-and-steel skyscrapers. So, it would seem that the developer is going a bit against the grain in its latest endeavor with a boutique office property in Minneapolis made largely of wood.

“The story of people can be told through infrastructure,” said author Ryan Gravel at the 2017 Carolinas Meeting in Charlotte. An urban planner by training, Gravel initially proposed the concept of the BeltLine in his Georgia Tech master’s thesis.

A redevelopment plan for a Chicago site presented by a team from the University of Texas at Austin has taken top honors in the 2017 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.

Completed in spring 2015, Chophouse Row is a 44,000-square-foot (4,000 sq m) mixed-use project in the Pike-Pine neighborhood of Seattle, less than one mile (1.6 km) from downtown, that combines loft office space, retail space, and three apartments. The development combines a circa-1924 industrial building with a new seven-story office tower, a through-block pedestrian alley/mews, and a midblock courtyard that links Chophouse Row with the developer’s other properties on the block, collectively known as 12th Avenue Marketplace.

Standing out in the urban core of Miami, Wynwood Walls started as a collection of six privately owned warehouses whose exterior walls were transformed into an outdoor “museum of the streets” by visionary developer Tony Goldman. The Walls surround more than 1.5 acres (0.6 ha) of land—former parking lots and junkyards—that now provide multiple areas that the public can enjoy at no charge.

How can land use foster the innovation economy? By partnering with anchor institutions and embracing the idea of a “minimum viable product,” where a stripped-down version is offered to early adopters and then modified based on the usage and other feedback, said development experts at a ULI Philadelphia event in February.

Graduated density zoning boosts the payoff to participating in land assembly—and could increase the supply of affordable housing.