Ten communities bring contemporary design approaches to housing for seniors.

How did Reston Town Center, set some 20 miles (32 km) from the nation’s capital in the leafy suburbs of Northern Virginia, generate premium real estate values and become desirable enough to compete for the best tenants? It is a story dating back more than 30 years, the product of critical decisions made by a host of real estate professionals, public officials, planners, and designers.

The city of Chicago is celebrating the adoption of an extensive overhaul of its building code that has been decades in the making. The new code means some big changes ahead for the city. For ULI Chicago’s Building Reuse Initiative, it also represents a significant step forward in its work to clear a path for more building reuse throughout the city.

In 2025, the country’s industrial market is experiencing a rebalancing in the wake of surging demand and record new supply that marked the early pandemic years. New opportunities in fast-growing markets are emerging, and demand drivers are shifting. New space demand will grow the most, especially for small-bay industrial assets, according to a Q3 2025 report from the business advisory and accounting firm Plante Moran.

Around the turn of the 21st century, downtown Kansas City, Missouri, faced challenges familiar to many American cities: abandoned buildings and surface parking lots filled 10 core blocks despite multiple redevelopment attempts dating to the 1960s. The downtown residential population was sparse, and some 60,000 downtown office workers made haste for the suburbs at 5 o’clock each weekday.

Drawing on insights from more than 1,700 leading real estate investors, developers, lenders and advisors across the U.S. and Canada, the report identifies key opportunities, risks and market shifts that will shape the industry in the coming year.

As cities confront the housing crisis, they face intersecting challenges: opposition not only to affordable-housing development but often to any development; spiraling financing and construction costs; outdated zoning that stifles or misplaces growth; egregious bureaucratic barriers; and issues around displacement and historic preservation. But some cities have an asset that can serve as a testing ground for harmonizing urgent priorities: their downtown districts.

In a period short on opportunities and long on challenges, design matters even more. Good design principles are always worth employing, whatever the development climate, but three key design aspects pertain in particular: alliance, resilience, and quality.

Experts speak about the near-term prospects for converting office buildings into multifamily housing, best practices for evaluating conversion potential, innovative ways the public sector can support these projects, and other related trends.

How urban planners are turning public places into vibrant centers for living, working, learning, and socializing.

According to the World Green Building Council, buildings currently account for a staggering 39 percent of global emissions, while trillions of dollars’ worth of real estate assets are at risk due to climate-related disasters. At the same time, utility providers are struggling to scale infrastructure to meet growing energy demands spurred by economic growth and development and unprecedented temperature extremes resulting in higher than usual utility charges and devastating outages. Now more than ever, the industry’s progress toward net zero emissions and resilience is critical.

RXR CEO and Chairman Scott Rechler, in a recent ULI members-only webinar with ULI Foundation Chair Faron A. Hill, described the challenges and opportunities ahead as an epic, unavoidable storm. “That hurricane … eventually, it’s going to hit land,” Rechler warned. “The question is when it hits, how hard it hits, and where it hits the hardest.”

Four experts discuss how to rebuild urban cores by bringing the public and private sectors together to create thriving downtowns that entice remote workers to return to the office and broaden the mix of uses.

Joseph E. Brown, a pioneering landscape architect, urban planner, and ULI Life Trustee who championed innovation and interdisciplinary collaboration to solve challenges in the built environment, has passed away at the age of 77. A ULI member for more than three decades, Brown served in many leadership roles in the organization and was a tireless champion of his home district council, ULI San Francisco.

AI, redefining what is possible

The following ten projects—all completed during the past five years—include facilities that strengthen pedestrian links to waterfronts, renovated buildings that open up interiors to views and daylight, and a converted JCPenney department store.

Four students from the London Business School have been announced as winners of the second ULI Hines Student Competition–Europe. The pan-European virtual real estate competition challenged teams to present their vision of a future workplace, based on the redevelopment of an office site in Amsterdam.

The wave of interest in well-being in the United Kingdom is expected to translate into significant investment over the next three years, according to ULI research released in the report Picture of Health: The Growing Role of Wellbeing in Commercial Real Estate Investment Decision-making. The report was released this month at an event in Birmingham, England, by the ULI U.K. Sustainability Forum to highlight the rise of well-being investment in commercial buildings.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Hong Kong is famous for its hospitality industry, but the sector has been under fire for the past three years. Even so, the hotel and food and beverage (F&B) industries have shown resilience and adaptability said panelists during a ULI Hong Kong conference in September.

The Hong Kong government’s recent decision to embrace a new tendering process for the sale of a prime parcel of waterfront land adjoining the Central business district marks a welcome departure from longstanding policy. In the past, such tenders were invariably awarded to the highest bidder without regard to the quality of the proposed development. Now, however, use of a “two-envelope” approach to sell the plot, known as Site 3, means that design also becomes part of the equation.

Communities around the world are racing to control the spread of the novel coronavirus and the disease that it causes, COVID-19. Increasingly, that means implementing aggressive social distancing measures, which can inhibit the spread of the virus and flatten the transmission curve. Given what is known about the virus so far, using building strategies to help slow the spread of the disease makes sense to help protect those who must work in an office or commercial setting and in multifamily settings.

Known as a multicultural melting pot, Singapore is one of the world’s most forward-thinking cities on embracing density, sustainability, and livability as guiding principles for urban design and development in a resource-constrained environment.

Dr. Cheong Koon Hean, a widely acclaimed architect and urban planner credited with shaping much of Singapore’s urban landscape, has been named the 2016 recipient of the ULI J.C. Nichols Prize for Visionaries in Urban Development. Dr. Cheong, the 17th Nichols laureate and the first from Asia, was honored during the 2016 ULI Fall Meeting in Dallas.

Singapore’s Urban Redevelopment Authority has transformed Marina Bay into mixed-use urban neighborhood. public open space, and source of drinking water for the country’s 5.4 million residents.