Knowledge Finder
Reports and Publications
Click for infrastructure related publications and case studies developed through primary research, convenings, and ULI member submission.
Research and Resources
Primary research and collaboration enable the Curtis Infrastructure Initiative to investigate key infrastructure strategies, challenges, and approaches to promote solutions that make cities more equitable, resilient, and enhance long-term community value.
“…if we don’t have transportation options for folks, then our places don’t work or economy doesn’t work. Or shopping doesn’t work. Or health care doesn’t work…These are not optional items.”
Shaw Symposium participant
Shaw Symposium on Urban Community Issues: Equitable Investment in Infrastructure and Housing
The annual Shaw Symposiums – named after renowned real estate entrepreneur, the late Charles H. Shaw – help leverage knowledge, experience and expertise from leading practitioners of urban development and public leadership. This year’s virtual event featured a series of presentations, open discussions, and breakout conversations focused on the relationship between infrastructure investment, housing, and land use. The ten key takeaways from the summary report include:
- Prior models of planning, financing, building, and maintaining the core components of our communities had fundamental flaws;
- There is a need for repair in our built environment, focusing both on the physical elements as well as restorative equity;
- The status quo model of housing and infrastructure investment must evolve to meet new challenges;
- The concept of infrastructure is evolving and full spectrum housing opportunities are a necessary component of a modern infrastructure strategy;
- The different elements of the built environment should be viewed as interconnected systems;
- Adaptation and resilience are critical components of future systems;
- The future of many regions and communities strongly resembles our cities of the past;
- Suburban areas can and should become more equitable and sustainable;
- The scale of the intervention needs to meet the scale of the challenge; and
- The time for action is now.
Click here to view the full report as well as recording of the June symposium and associated briefing materials for the participants.
Broadband and Real Estate: Understanding the Opportunity
We live in a world that is increasingly interconnected and digitalized. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the real estate and land use industry had felt the effects of connectivity and had taken advantage of it, from the increased interest in property technology—or proptech, the innovative use of technology in the real estate industry—to the rise of e-commerce affecting worldwide logistics and manufacturing markets. All this connectivity and digitalization relies on the speed, capacity, and reliability of our world’s internet infrastructure.
The demands of large-scale work from home, school from home, accelerated e-commerce, telehealth, and even family gatherings pushed more of our lives online and exponentially increased demands on internet infrastructure to unprecedented levels and strained capacity in unanticipated ways. This demand also helped shift the real estate industry itself from thinking just in terms of physical space to also considering how to engage within a virtual environment.
The Broadband and Real Estate: Understanding the Opportunity report identifies challenges and the opportunities in addressing the digital divide, the tools and techniques available for both the real estate and land use industry, and the need for communities to expand and best take advantage of this connectivity.
Click here to read the report.
Infrastructure Resources
The Curtis Infrastructure Initiative helps align the significant body of work ULI has produced related to infrastructure within topics such as creating healthy and equitable places, adapting and mitigating to climate change, increasing housing choices and affordability, and practical approaches for project implementation.
ULI Member Global Infrastructure Survey Findings
To better understand perceived quality and infrastructure priorities by the real estate and land use industry as well as how infrastructure investment will affect real estate development trends, the ULI Curtis Infrastructure Initiative conducted a survey of its members between April 20 and May 17, 2021. The survey also explores what infrastructure means to ULI members based on the initiative’s goal to leverage infrastructure investment to better effect a sense of community and place.
The report and key findings can be found here.
Benefits and Burdens: Case Studies in Transportation Equity in the Philadelphia Region
ULI Philadelphia partnered with the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission (DVRPC), to advise graduate students from Temple University to assess the impact of major transportation projects on communities of color and low-income communities in Southeastern Pennsylvania and Southern New Jersey. The Curtis Infrastructure Initiative provided financial support for the project.
The report, with recommended steps to mitigate the burdens of past transportation projects and create better future outcomes presented to DVRPC, can be found here.
Learn More
Let’s build long-term community value through equitable and resilient infrastructure investments together.