Europe and the Middle East
ULI Europe is led by a professional staff team and committed members who volunteer their time. Trustees serve as the high-level leadership group of ULI, responsible for representing and serving as the voice of the broad and diverse membership in substantive matters facing ULI in the execution of its mission. The ULI Europe Executive Committee oversees ULI’s activities across Europe. The committee is led by the ULI Europe Chairman. Each European National Council is led by a Council Chair, who typically serves a two-year term. Activities and programmes for National Councils are driven by a executive committees of local members. ULI’s European Product Councilsare co-chaired by members who lead on the programming for each council.
Durkin joins ULI from BlackRock senior leadership, where he held the position of global head of real estate research and strategy. His appointment as CEO Europe marks a continuation of the Institute’s mission and momentum, reinforcing its focus on member value, decision-making relevance, and long-term impact across the built environment at a time of significant change for the industry in Europe and globally.
ULI Europe publishes new guide on asset-level collaboration to accelerate decarbonization of occupied buildings
For almost 200 years, the Warsaw Citadel in the heart of Poland’s capital was a restricted military and administrative area, cut off from public access. With the recent opening of the Polish History Museum, as well as the new Polish Army Museum, the 19th-century fortress’s 74-acre (30 ha) grounds now serve as a multifunctional facility and park that both preserves and showcases the country’s rich cultural heritage.
Steps from the Place de l’Europe in Paris, the French real estate company Covivio has recast a historic telephone exchange as its headquarters. Dubbed “L’Atelier,” the complex showcases the firm’s expertise, values, and culture; houses 250 Paris employees; and supports the company’s three business lines: office, hotel, and residential.
Holiday travelers may notice that airport-connected hotels are incorporating more regional touches, from façade to dining. Here are five examples that offer the ultimate luxury, a short walk from guest room to terminal.
With society and the real estate industry significantly behind on achieving the targets set in the Paris Agreement, and worsening affordability in Europe’s housing, ULI Europe’s C Change for Housing program has launched a landmark interactive systems map and companion report to help the real estate industry identify, co-create, and scale the solutions needed to decarbonize existing and future affordable housing.
Four exemplary real estate projects were named the overall winners of the 2025 ULI Europe Awards for Excellence from this year’s ten finalists. The diverse winning projects include a social housing project in Milan situated on an abandoned office development site, a new secondary school in Brussels developed in a former brewery, a new flexible life sciences hub in Stockholm, and an acute healthcare facility in Birmingham, which is intended as a catalyst for community regeneration.
Concerns about deglobalization surge, AI revolutionizes real estate, and top European cities for investment identified as London, Madrid, Paris, Berlin, and Amsterdam
How a two-week Fellowship by the Holcim Foundation and ETH Zurich turned the EU’s “Renovation Wave” into a practical playbook for policy, finance, and culture.
Ten built environment projects from eight countries across the EMEA region have been announced as the finalists in the sixth annual ULI Europe Awards for Excellence, which recognize exemplary projects and programs in the private, public, and non-profit sectors. This year’s finalists comprise cutting edge refurbishment, restoration and new build projects, and include residential, healthcare, mixed use, education, community, laboratory, and office projects from Italy, Germany, the UK, Belgium, Sweden, Denmark, France, and Spain.
A two-week program, hosted by UCL’s Department of Civil, Environmental & Geomatic Engineering and led by José Torero, Matthew Heywood, and Michael Woodrow, with a cohort of early-career professionals tested the limits of The London Plan and imaged what could lie ahead through a fellowship themed “Innovating Tomorrow’s Resilience.”
Despite geopolitical headwinds, green building regulations continue to gain momentum among local authorities. Many cities have moved beyond reporting requirements to demand practical, asset-level action. Numerous jurisdictions have introduced requirements on net-zero carbon and energy efficiency in buildings, fossil fuel-free heating, embodied carbon, electric vehicle (EV) charging facilities, and climate adaptation measures.
During his keynote speech at the 2025 ULI Europe Conference in London on June 18, Daniel Lacalle. chief economist of Spanish private bank Tressis, told real estate business leaders they should be allocating more investment dollars to hard assets such as real estate. “Hold hard assets like there is no tomorrow,” he said. “Hold onto hard assets as much as you can.”
The awards celebrate a senior leader, a young professional and a DEI champion
Top 10 takeaways from ULI’s Health Leaders Network Alumni Convening in the Netherlands
A new ULI report, supported by C Change and Net Zero Imperative, outlines the key barriers to decarbonization, and presents seven guiding principles that address asset stranding risk.
ULI Europe is calling for innovators from across the built environment and technology to submit groundbreaking solutions to tackle the dual crises of housing affordability and decarbonization of the built environment, in the ULI PropTech Innovation Challenge (PIC) 2025.
Although ready to commence a new real estate cycle, real estate leaders globally are braced for another challenging year of uncertainty, with lingering inflation, largely driven by factors including geopolitical instability, and persistently higher interest rates in some regions, potentially delaying a hoped-for recovery in capital markets and occupancy metrics. This is according to the Emerging Trends in Real Estate® Global Outlook 2025 from PwC and ULI, which provides an important gauge of global sentiment for investment and development prospects, amalgamating and updating three regional reports which canvassed thousands of real estate leaders across Europe, the United States and Asia Pacific.
In the Belgian municipality of Edegem, just a 20-minute bike ride from Antwerp’s city center, a brownfield site that once stored camera film has become a biodiverse, sustainable mixed-use residential and commercial neighborhood.
For two hundred years, the Warsaw Citadel at the heart of Poland’s capital was a restricted military and administrative area, cut off from public access. With the recent opening of the Polish History Museum, as well as the new Polish Army Museum, the 19th-century fortress’ 74-acre (30 ha) grounds now serve as a multifunctional cultural and educational facility and park that preserves and showcases the country’s heritage.
Milan’s Olympic Village is being built now in preparation for the Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics and Paralympics. Developers and designers have high hopes for the complex’s third act as a hyper-sustainable, 1,700-bed student housing project and anchor for a new city park.
Preserve will enable the consistent assessment and measurement of climate transition impacts in real estate investment models.
Collaboration showcases cutting-edge tech solutions to key real estate challenges.
As concerns about the sustainability of the world’s love affair with the car and airplane grow, the European Union aims to put more people back on trains, a strategy that will require not only laying new tracks but refurbishing old stations. From Barcelona to Vilnius, some of these developments aim not only to make public transportation more convenient but to renew the quarter in which they are located.
Regulatory environment among the barriers to more adoption of modular construction techniques in Europe.
Lars Huber, the CEO of Hines Europe, has been appointed as ULI Europe Chairman. Huber, who succeeds Marnix Galle, Executive Chair of the Board of developer Immobel, will serve on a voluntary basis for a two-year term starting on July 1.
Marnix Galle, executive chairman of Belgian developer Immobel, has been appointed ULI Europe Chairman, serving on a voluntary basis for a two-year term starting on July 1, 2020, and will join the ULI Global Board of Directors. He succeeds outgoing Europe Chairman Juergen Fenk, member of the executive board, SIGNA Holding GmbH.
New lending by European banks is likely to remain strictly conservative, limiting liquidity for the European property market.
At the ULI Europe Paris 2011 conference in February, former Irish Prime Minister John Bruton said that, in addressing their nations’ economic troubles, Europeans see problems that cannot be fixed, whereas Americans see challenges for which solutions have not yet been found. Learn what he says about Europe’s banking crisis and how to get the monkey off the back of the European economy.
