A new land bank in Cook County, Illinois, plans to get vacant foreclosed homes back to productive life.

This fall, Urban Landwill be available for the first time as an app for tablets and smartphones on either Apple’s iOS operating system or Google’s Android. As a preview, the Urban Land magazine app will offer our September/October issue free of charge to anyone wishing to download it. Starting with the November/December issue, an authentication feature that restricts access to ULI members will be added.

Leading up to this year’s ULI Fall Meeting in Chicago, Urban Landwill highlight projects and topics of interest from the Chicagoland area. Chicago Coverage

Designers and officials are promoting a return to an old staple of active lifestyles and designing places with stairways that are inviting, safe, and comfortable.

Resources that drove the old industrial economy—a central location and access to power—plus available industrial space, give Chicago an edge in the data center business.

Two-time governor of Florida Jeb Bush will deliver the closing keynote address at the ULI Fall Meeting in Chicago November 5–8. Other speakers will include: Sam Zell, founder of Equity Group Investments and chairman of Equity International; Dan Pelino, general manager, Global Public Sector, IBM; and Cia Buckley, chief investment officer of Dune Real Estate Partners.

What for a decade had been referred to either as the “Bloomingdale Trail” or simply “the Bloomingdale” will be referred to going forward as “the 606,” it was announced in June by the Trust for Public Land (TPL), a national nonprofit organization that conserves land for public open space. The number denotes the zip-code prefix shared by all Chicagoans and alludes to the trail’s origin as a rail line.

Work will begin this summer to transform an abandoned 2.7-mile (4.4 km) stretch of elevated railway in Chicago into the Bloomingdale Trail, the city’s only pedestrian greenway and bike path running east to west, which ultimately will connect pedestrians and cyclists to trails that stretch all the way to the Indiana state line.

With the U.S. grappling with how to address more than $2 trillion in infrastructure needs, PPPs increasingly are the answer, according to panelists at the ULI Fall Meeting in Denver.

Seven big-city mayors, all fellows of the ULI Rose Center for Public Leadership, outline plans to revitalize areas of their cities.