Denver’s historic train station is being re-created as a multimodal transit center, hotel, and shopping venue. And it is already spurring development in the Mile High City.

Natural assets, combined with inventive design, help transform a global gateway.

Generation Y and Boomers are both challenging assumptions about the primacy of suburban homeownership. More than ever, renters and homebuyers are focusing on a sense of place and amenities rather than on the size of their homes.

Far from being loners, singles in the city are creating connections—and vitality—says Eric Klinenberg, author of Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone.

Museum Place, a large-scale infill development on an 11-acre (4.5 ha) site assembled in the cultural district of Fort Worth, Texas, is designed to knit 11 new structures into a finer-grained urban fabric of streets to connect to nearby museums and surrounding uses so it can flexibly mix offices, retail space, hotel space, and housing.

“Mixed-use developments mean we stop thinking so much about buildings as buildings but as communities,” said Richard Vogel, senior vice president and general manager of Ivanhoe Cambridge China, at ULI’s Asia Pacific Summit. These substantial and often iconic developments are a weighty undertaking, crucial to the regeneration and improvement of cities, particularly in rapidly urbanizing countries such as China and India.

“The attributes of the single-family house are becoming obstacles to aging in place well,” with the distance from shops and services and the lack of walkability, said Ellen Dunham Jones, architecture professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “We need to link the needs of the aging population with dead big-box stores and dying malls.”

Telecommuters are an expanding workforce sector with needs different from those of typical workers. Many of these needs could be met by a new type of home-office building. In addition, energy efficiencies and an improved quality of life for telecommuters could be achieved.

Members of ULI’s Community Development Council speak about the impact of the slow economy, the increased appeal of smaller sites in denser locations, consumers’ current amenity preferences, the impact of ethnic and demographic changes, and the rising demand for housing that can accommodate multiple generations.