On 29 June 2026, around 400 senior leaders gathered at Guildhall in the City of London for the first Built World Summit, hosted by NLA with founding partners Arup, Gensler, JLL, Places for London, and Savills, under the theme of Resilient Cities. Investors, developers, designers, engineers, asset owners, civic leaders, policy makers and other city operators spent a day in one room, addressing the same critical big picture questions. 

The day opened with keynotes from Dan Labbad, Chief Executive of The Crown Estate and David Buck, Deputy Director of the Office for Investment. They affirmed the intention. If we take our place imperatives seriously, we must reframe the ways we combine systems, projects, and partnerships to achieve optimum co-investment from all who enjoy the co-benefits of our cities.        

Six ingredients, I think, set this Summit apart. 

The first was a whole world perspective. We did not convene a national conversation with international guests. We compared cycles across regions that are moving in genuinely different directions: expanding, stabilising, ageing, and shrinking. West and Central Europe, Northeast Asia, Middle East, Southeast Asia, and North America were all present in the argument, not as case studies but as evidence. The era of universal, uniform urban growth and development is over, and the room understood that an investment portfolio, a design practice, or a public authority must each now read distinct regional cycles rather than assume global trends. 

The second was a full cycle point of view. Every session took the whole turn of cycle and the whole life of a real asset as its unit of analysis: origination, development, operation, retrofit, and reuse. It reframes housing viability, infrastructure business cases, the pricing of climate risk, and the structure of partnership between public and private capital. Value creation is shifting from expansion to adaptation, from capital gains to income stability, and from single asset logic to cycle-long stewardship. We took that shift as its starting point rather than its conclusion. 

The third was revealing the size and significance of both the Built World, and the urbanisation trajectory. A human population pushing towards eighty-five per cent urbanisation within the next five decades, with a plausible total of nine billion people living in cities and urbanised regions.  A $380 trillion asset class, roughly half of global wealth. Some $13 trillion of annual construction output. A quarter of a billion people employed. Around a third of global energy use and carbon emissions.1 These figures are not decoration. They establish that the Built World is not a sector among sectors but the physical foundation of the world economy and global resource challenge, and that it should be at the table wherever the future of the planet, economy, or industry is discussed. 

The fourth was the Built World as a site of innovation and discovery, not merely of delivery. FutureFit, with Gensler’s Harry Cliffe-Roberts, Art-Invest Real Estate’s Chris Schorah, Stanhope’s Helena Morris, Helical’s Matthew Redgrove, and Cognizant’s Penny Tonks, defined retrofit as invention rather than repair. Infrastructure as Place, with Arup’s Joanna Rowelle and Chintan Raveshia alongside KGM’s Kate Willard OBE reframed major infrastructure as the generative backbone of cities rather than their constraint. The sequencing of the capital genome for innovation geographies with JLL’s Travis McCready and Sue Asprey Price, alongside Related Argent’s John Forrester, M&G’s Martin Towns, and PIF’s Khaled Alsalman;station districts with Places for London’s Graeme Craig, Platform 4’s Andrew Ferguson, and Sherin Aminossehe of the Ministry of Defence; and the emerging cohort of mid-tier, high-quality-of-life cities that Kelcie Sellers and Savills track, with contributions from Mitsui Fudosan’s David Height and Penta Real Estate’s Pavel Streblov, and that are learning to pivot, all pointed the same way.2 Our industry discovers new platforms and processes and invents ways of creating value. It has been too modest about saying so, and too slow to invest in the R&D that would let it say so with authority. 

The fifth was a leadership agenda. A poll of the room found that around seventy-two per cent believed the global leadership agenda for our sector is currently unclear. That is a finding, not a complaint. The closing panel with Nick McKeogh, CEO of NLA, Dominique Moerenhout, CEO of EPRA, Stephen Pantano, Senior Fellow for Market Transformation of ULI, Méka Brunel, President of Fondation Palladio, and Vanessa Hale, Chief Executive of Real Estate: UK asked what the Built World owes society, how it needs to renew its social contract and licence to operate, and who would answer if global institutions called. The Built World Declaration, which drew wide support at Guildhall, is our first collective answer: a public commitment to adaptation, resilience, flexibility, frugality, and leadership.3 It is a statement of intent and a framework for accountability. 

The sixth was London as host. Not as a model to copy, but as a learning city that has continuously improvised and rebuilt itself for two thousand years, and that hosts an unmatched concentration of the firms and institutions that plan, finance, design, build, renew and operate cities worldwide.4 London's challenges on affordability and decarbonisation were named in the room as candidly as its successes. They are seen here as innovation imperatives. That appetite is precisely what makes London a serious place to begin. 

These ingredients connect outwards. The UN General Assembly convened in New York for the high-level meeting on the midterm review of the New Urban Agenda, on 16 and 17 July 2026, under the theme of accelerating implementation to 2036.5 The New London Agenda offers a city-making framework at the local scale.6 The NLA Built World Exchange gives the Summit a practical vehicle between annual meetings. The Declaration should now speak into all three. 

So, the agenda for 2036 is already cogent. Price climate risk honestly. Establish the long-term capital structures for the things we really need (housing, climate transition, energy sovereignty, digital utilities, connective infrastructure).  Match demographic transition with the right housing, care, and services. Confront obsolescence and scale reuse. Mature the governance of public and private partnership. Promote transparency and report back, in public, on what has actually moved. 

We began something at Guildhall. That evening we shared the vision and energy with more than two hundred ambassadors and investment/trade envoys from around the world. Continuity is what will turn this into a movement, and action will promote hope, that in turn will accelerate how we together shape better cities. I look forward to seeing you next year.