Situated just across the street from the University of Cincinnati campus, U Square @ the Loop buzzes with activity. The two city blocks of LEED-certified, mid-rise, mixed-use development house students and young professionals; provide a welcome array of restaurants, shops and gathering spaces; and are home to several university offices.

Water Tower Shoppes in Celebration, Fla., was not always the destination retail center that it is today. Just three years ago, Walt Disney Company (developer of Celebration) executives and most locals detested the “black eye” they drove past every day.

If Sigmund Freud were alive today, his signature question might not be “what does a woman want?” Rather, it might be “what do the millennials want?” Underlying the optimism expressed at NAIOP’s Development ‘13: The Annual Meeting for Commercial Real Estate about recovering markets and revived demand was a clear sense of uncertainty about what changes might be afoot in both office and industrial space demand and design owing to the growing presence of millennials in the workforce.

During the spring and summer of 2013, NAIOP conducted a design competition in which it sought concepts for the Distribution/Fulfillment Center of the Future. NAIOP invited architects to conceptualize and design the physical “goods exchange” structure that will accommodate distribution, fulfillment and retail functions in the year 2020.

The most dramatic changes in the history of green building certification programs are unfolding in 2013, as both Green Globes and LEED undergo major updates. Changes to the Green Globes program are intended to improve technical rigor and enhance ease of use, as well as to reflect how current building science influences materials selection and other choices in building design and construction.

Public transportation has long been regarded as a vital component to a healthy local economy. Today, local economic engines can be further fueled by creative land use concepts involving transit elements. Rochester, N.Y., for example, was able to attract hundreds of millions of investment dollars for a variety of innovative, transit-related development projects.

Transit-oriented development has been promoted as a way to combat congestion, pollution and other problems associated with sprawling, auto-dominated suburban growth patterns. City leaders typically believe that developers will only invest in projects located along rail-based transit lines, including light-rail transit and streetcars. Yet a recent report demonstrates that the type of transit matters less than how much government support it gets.

Bethesda, Md.-based StonebridgeCarras was named the recipient of NAIOP’s annual Sustainable Development Award, which was presented during a special ceremony at Development ‘13: The Annual Meeting for Commercial Real Estate.