The Built World: An Agenda for the Next 25 Years

Thursday 18 June 2026

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Senior Advisor
NLA

The Built World: An Agenda for the Next 25 Years

Ahead of the Built World Summit, moderator Prof Greg Clark CBE concludes his three-part series by outlining the challenges, opportunities and leadership commitments that will define the next era of city-making. A timely call to action for everyone shaping, financing, designing and delivering the built environment.

The buildings, infrastructure, and places we plan, finance, design, construct, retrofit, and operate in the next twenty-five years will shape outcomes for the rest of this century, and arguably well beyond it. The Built World does not work on quarterly cycles. It works on generational ones. So what should the agenda be for the next quarter-century? What should capital, capability, and civic leadership now commit themselves to, individually and collectively, in public and at scale?

These are the questions the Built World Summit at Guildhall, hosted by NLA on 29 June 2026, has been designed to address. This third article, the last in this short series, sets out our view of the agenda. It draws on the framing material we have developed with our founding partners, on the questions our opening panel of leading global investors will pose, and on the closing leadership panel that will articulate the Built World Declaration.

It is not a complete agenda. No single document, summit, or institution can produce one. But it is, I hope, a coherent one: an agenda that names the medium-term tensions our industry must now resolve, the questions capital must answer to open the next cycle, the imperatives that should guide design, finance, and operation, and the leadership commitments that turn intent into delivery.

It is also written with a particular horizon in mind. Twenty-five years is a useful frame for our industry. It is long enough to span at least one full investment cycle, and the operating life of most major asset classes from initial investment to first significant retrofit. It is short enough that the people taking decisions today will still be present, and accountable, when those decisions begin to deliver, or fail to deliver, the outcomes they were supposed to produce. It is the horizon over which most of the world’s urbanisation between now and 2080 will be locked in, in physical form, with carbon, capital, and civic consequences that we will all live with.

Four medium-term agendas the industry must resolve

If the Built World is to open its next great investment cycle on credible terms, it must first resolve a clear set of medium-term agendas inherited from the current one. There are at least four.

The first is climate risk: how to incorporate physical risk, transition cost, and the long-term adaptation premium into investment theses, capital structures, and valuation methods that are credible to occupiers, regulators, and underwriters. We are now well past the point where a generic environmental, social, and governance overlay is sufficient. What is required is full pricing of climate-related risk and return, asset by asset, portfolio by portfolio, city by city, with the accompanying disclosure that allows that pricing to be tested and refined over time.

The second is demographic transition: how to align the supply of housing, care, and urban services with populations that are simultaneously ageing, becoming more diverse, and concentrating unevenly across regions. Demographic change is the slowest-moving force in our industry, but it is one of the most decisive. Cities that misread it, by under-investing in housing for older people, or over-investing in formats that the next generation will not occupy, will pay for that error for decades.

The third is obsolescence: how to manage the rapid devaluation of stock that cannot meet new climate, occupier, and operational performance standards, and how to scale the retrofit, reuse, and repurposing programmes that turn obsolete assets back into productive ones. This is the single largest growth market the Built World now faces, and it is also the most underserved by current capital structures and professional practices.

The fourth is governance: how to forge more durable partnerships between public and private sectors, capable of sharing generational responsibilities and delivering full investment cycles, rather than discrete transactions. The recent record on partnership between public and private sectors is, to put it generously, mixed. The next quarter-century will require structures that are more transparent, more equitable in their distribution of risk and reward, and more honest about the long-term obligations of each party.

Resolving these four medium-term agendas is the precondition for the next great cycle of Built World investment. Without them, capital will continue to flow into familiar formats and known markets, missing the larger opportunity. With them, the next cycle could be the most productive, equitable, and durable in the history of the industry.

Five questions for the next cycle

The Summit’s opening panel brings together three of the world’s leading Built World investors, drawn from real estate, infrastructure, and full-cycle capital. The panel is structured around five questions, which together describe the operational agenda for the next investment cycle.

The first question concerns the investable universe. As populations flatten in many regions while urbanisation continues apace, with around 1,600 cities of more than one million people projected by 2080, how should investors define the investable universe of cities for real estate and infrastructure?1 The honest answer requires more than the familiar rankings of gateway cities. It requires a serious framework for distinguishing among the trajectories of expanding, stabilising, ageing, and shrinking cities, and for thinking about portfolios as exposures across these different cycles.

The second question concerns climate as a core investment discipline. As global warming and urban resilience become defining agendas, how can investment theses credibly incorporate the full climate risks and returns of the Built World, including physical risk, transition cost, and the long-term adaptation premium? This is the single most consequential underwriting question facing the industry. Solving it credibly will reshape the cost of capital across the sector.

The third question concerns digital infrastructure and full-cycle capital. As artificial intelligence and digital technologies accelerate, driving very substantial demand for digital infrastructure, data centres, resilient energy supply, and sufficient land, how should new full-cycle capital structures and partnerships be crafted to finance the whole investment cycle, from origination through development to operation and renewal? The data and digital economy is being built in the Built World; it is becoming, in itself, a major real-asset category.

The fourth question concerns housing at scale. With housing affordability crises emerging in almost all successful cities, driven by supply constraints, limited diversification of types, tenures, and formats, insufficient public investment, and tight regulation, how can a new scale of institutional investment be forged for urban housing? The answer cannot be a return to under-regulated speculation, nor a withdrawal of capital into ever-narrower segments of luxury demand. It must be a serious institutional commitment to housing as a long-term asset class, capable of serving the full range of urban populations.

The fifth question concerns durable partnerships between public and private sectors. How can more enduring investment partnerships between public and private sectors be forged to deliver the whole cycle of development, and to share its generational responsibilities? This is, in many ways, the test of all the others. The medium-term agendas above cannot be resolved by capital alone, or by public authorities alone. They will be resolved through the partnerships that capital and public authorities build with one another, and with the communities they serve.

These five questions are not academic. They are the operational questions on which the next cycle of the Built World will turn.

Five imperatives for the next 25 years

Across the Summit, and in the Built World Declaration that closes it, we have framed the practical answer around five imperatives. They are intended as anchors for capital, design, operation, and policy alike, and as a shared vocabulary for the years ahead.

Adaptation. The Built World must prioritise the renewal, retrofit, and repurposing of existing buildings, districts, and infrastructure as the central strategy for sustainable and investable urban futures. In much of the world, the city of the future is already built. The task is to extend its life and improve its performance, not to replace it. Adaptation is the largest growth market of the next quarter-century, and the most direct route to durable value, lower carbon, and stronger urban outcomes.

Resilience. The Built World must be designed and operated to absorb stress, recover from disruption, and adapt over time, in the face of climate change, demographic transition, technological change, and systemic shocks. Resilience is becoming a core investment discipline, not an optional add-on. Resilient assets protect people, reduce volatility, and preserve long-term value in an increasingly uncertain world.

Flexibility. The Built World must be designed for change. The future use of buildings and places can no longer be predicted with confidence, and assets that cannot be reprogrammed will increasingly underperform. Buildings that can change use, infrastructure that can evolve, and places that can be reprogrammed over time preserve optionality, reduce obsolescence risk, and outperform across cycles.

Frugality. The Built World must do more with less. Carbon budgets, material limits, fiscal pressure, and land scarcity together impose real constraints, and frugality is no longer a compromise but a source of competitive advantage. Lean construction, efficient design, circular use of materials, and value-driven investment deliver stronger performance with fewer resources, improving affordability and aligning long-term returns with planetary limits.

Leadership. The Built World cannot deliver the first four imperatives without a step-change in leadership: across capital, capability, and civic institutions, working in alignment over long horizons. Capital must support long-term value creation. Policy must enable reuse, quality, and adaptability. Professional practice must focus on outcomes, performance, and whole-life stewardship. Cities cannot be shaped by projects alone; they are shaped by the way decisions are made, trade-offs negotiated, and partnerships sustained over time.

These five imperatives are deliberately concise. They are intended to be remembered, used, and applied, not catalogued. They are the practical anchors of the Summit programme and the substantive heart of the Built World Declaration.

Five sessions, five practical answers

The Summit’s five partner sessions translate the imperatives into concrete agendas. Each is led by a founding partner with deep expertise in the relevant domain.

Gensler leads the session on Retrofit at Scale, which is now an economic and environmental imperative rather than an aspiration. The session introduces FutureFit, Gensler’s vision for the next chapter in commercial office design. Good design now looks different in a world where performance, flexibility, and sustainability are non-negotiable. The session opens with a keynote from Gensler’s Global Building Transformation and Adaptive Reuse Leader, followed by a panel of developers and tenants from global and London-based firms.

JLL leads the session on Finance for Innovation Geographies. The next urban cycle will be defined, in part, by the cities that can attract and retain innovation, talent, and growth capital. New capital structures and a growing pool of private wealth are creating fresh opportunities to develop and renew these innovation geographies. JLL’s session examines the changing capital base for real estate investment, and asks how investors, developers, and city leaders can connect global capital with high-quality, large-scale opportunities in the world’s most innovative urban areas.

Places for London and Platform 4 lead the session on Connected Places. Well-connected, publicly owned land is one of the most powerful and underused tools for city renewal. When infrastructure investment is aligned with placemaking and development, it can catalyse entire new districts, deliver housing at scale, and strengthen the social and economic fabric of cities. The session explores how public landowners can use rail connectivity assets to drive new district development, particularly through the development of major station districts, and to align long-term public and private investment around inclusive, well-designed, and financially sustainable urban growth.

Savills leads the session on Delivering in a Resilient World. The session draws on insights from the Savills Resilient Cities Index, which measures 490 cities across five dimensions of resilience, and from the forthcoming June 2026 report Delivering in a Resilient World.2 While powerhouse cities such as New York, Tokyo, London, and Seoul continue to lead, a growing cohort of mid-tier cities is rising rapidly, demonstrating the capacity to pivot and adapt to structural change. Drawing on research across eight global markets, the session explores how investors, developers, and city leaders can sustain viable development across generations in the world’s most adaptable and durable cities.

Arup leads the session on Infrastructure as Catalyst, drawing on projects across London, the Thames Estuary, and a range of international examples. The session reframes infrastructure not as a constraint on cities but as their generative backbone, capable of unlocking economic, social, and environmental benefits well beyond its own boundaries. It develops the concept of Infrastructure as Place: major infrastructure as the platform on which inclusive growth, decarbonisation, and long-term prosperity are built.

Together, these five sessions are the practical agenda of the Summit: not abstract themes, but evidence-based discussions about how capital, capability, and civic leadership can actually deliver the next cycle. They are framed by an opening investor panel that poses the operational questions, and a closing leadership panel that articulates the institutional response.

London as the place to begin

It is fair to ask why the agenda for the next twenty-five years should be framed in London. The answer, in short, is that London is one of the most useful learning grounds the global Built World currently has.

For nearly two thousand years, London has improvised, negotiated, and rebuilt itself. It is, by temperament and tradition, a city that learns by doing. It hosts an unparalleled concentration of the people, firms, and institutions that plan, design, finance, build, operate, and renew cities. It is one of the world’s largest clusters of investable real estate and infrastructure assets, and one of the most highly traded service economies in the built environment industry, with London-based firms delivering complex projects across Europe, North America, the Middle East, and Asia.3 As the NLA’s recent Connected Capital report makes clear, London is a gateway through which capital, talent, and ideas flow into the United Kingdom and out to the world, drawing on experience developed in one of the world’s most demanding urban environments.

This is not an argument for London exceptionalism. It is an argument for London as a useful place to begin a global conversation, particularly one focused on Resilient Cities. London’s record on housing affordability, decarbonisation, and inequality is not the model anyone should copy wholesale, and the Summit programme has been designed to draw honestly on international experience as well as London’s. But London is somewhere the global community of practice can compare cycles, test ideas, and learn across difference: between renewal and growth, retrofit and new build, stewardship and invention. It is the right place to host an annual Summit, precisely because it is a place where the agenda is being lived out in practice every day.

The Built World Declaration

The Summit closes with the signing of the Built World Declaration. It is a shared commitment by partners and leaders, agreed at Guildhall, to long-term value creation, adaptation and reuse, resilience, flexibility and frugality, and the leadership and learning needed to shape better cities and better outcomes across the coming decades.

The Declaration recognises that no single sector can deliver the transition described in these articles alone. Collaboration is essential. Learning matters. Cities must become places where knowledge is created, tested, codified, and shared, across regions, markets, and cycles. The Declaration is a statement of intent and a call to action, a public undertaking by leaders from investment, the built environment professions, and city and civic leadership to work together over the years ahead.

It is not a press release. It is a public, accountable commitment, and it is the first such commitment ever assembled at this scale across capital, capability, and civic leadership in the Built World. We will return to it, and to the actions it triggers, in subsequent Summits.

Leadership, and an invitation

If global institutions wished to engage the Built World on the future of the planet, who would they call? At present, no single body. The closing leadership panel of the Summit, with Nick McKeogh of NLA, Dominique Moerenhout of EPRA, Aimee Witteman of ULI, and Méka Brunel of Gecina and the French Foundation for the Built Environment, addresses this question directly. It asks what the wider purpose of the Built World now is in society, how the sector renews its licence to operate, and what leadership is required to align capital, climate, and collective prosperity.

The proposition we will put on the table is straightforward. The Built World cannot shape better cities without shaping better leadership. Leadership in this sense means systems thinking, climate literacy, cross-sector partnership, long-term governance discipline, and moral credibility alongside financial credibility. It means being willing to commit, in public, to specific behaviours, choices, and standards that are not always the most profitable in the short term but are the most consequential in the long one.

This is the agenda we are setting for the next twenty-five years. It is ambitious, and it is incomplete. Each Summit will refine and extend it, with new partners, new evidence, and new commitments. The 2026 Summit, on the theme of Resilient Cities, is the start of an annual process, not its conclusion.

Around 500 senior leaders will gather at Guildhall on 29 June 2026, with associated programming through 1 July. Architects, planners, engineers, developers, investors, fund managers, civic leaders, and policy makers are all invited. If your work shapes, finances, designs, builds, operates, or governs cities, this Summit is for you.

Registration is now open through NLA. I hope you will join us at Guildhall, contribute to the conversations there, and consider signing the Built World Declaration. The agenda for the next twenty-five years cannot be set by anyone alone. It will be shaped by those who choose to be in the room, and by what they are prepared to commit to in public when they leave.

Notes

OECD, Cities in the World: A New Perspective on Urbanisation (Paris: OECD Publishing, 2020); United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, World Urbanization Prospects: The 2024 Revision (New York: UN DESA, 2024).
Savills, Resilient Cities Index 2024 (London: Savills Research, 2024); Savills, Delivering in a Resilient World, forthcoming June 2026.
NLA, Connected Capital: London and the World’s Built Environment (London: NLA, 2024); see also NLA, The Built Environment Sector (London: NLA, 2023).

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Prof. Greg Clark CBE

Senior Advisor
NLA