Here’s your weekly breakdown of the forces shaping tomorrow’s cities.
You Should Know
- There will be $7.6 trillion in cumulative AI infrastructure spending through 2031, according to a recent Goldman Sachs report. The analysis argues that the final figure actually hinges less on demand than on a few key supply-side constraints: chip depreciation timelines, data center costs, and the pace of power infrastructure buildout.
- Next-gen nuclear is rapidly entering the public markets. X-energy completed a $1 billion IPO in April, General Fusion and Newcleo announced plans to go public via SPAC mergers earlier this year, and Deep Fission filed for an IPO last month.
- The Star of the Seas and its sister cruise ship, each carrying about 10,000 people, are the world’s largest “floating cities” at sea. But Freedom Cruise Line is pitching a floating city that’s a mile long.
Worth Watching
- See the proposed Freedom Ship, a floating city of 80,000 inhabitants that will travel the world.
- How did planners design Soviet cities?
- Understanding garbage trucks: every type and what they’re actually built for.
Top Stories
The $7B Chicago Project Reshaping Sports Real Estate
Chicago is attempting what the sports real estate industry rarely achieves: building a genuine neighborhood around an arena rather than a commercial district designed solely to capture fan spending.
The vehicle for this shift is The 1901 Project — a $7 billion, 13-million-square-foot redevelopment of 55 acres of United Center parking lots backed by the owners of the Chicago Bulls and Blackhawks. By prioritizing community over commerce, the project directly challenges the logic that has governed stadium-adjacent development for two decades.
Sports real estate has evolved through distinct phases. The first generation built arenas inside rings of surface parking and waited for the city to fill in around them.
The second, best represented by The Battery Atlanta, built by the Atlanta Braves around Truist Park, proved that franchises could become real estate developers, generating year-round revenue from offices, hotels, and retail built to capture corporate and fan spend. That model worked financially, but it produced polished entertainment districts closed off from the surrounding city fabric.
The 1901 Project is attempting a third approach: treating the arena as one amenity inside a dense, mixed-income, year-round neighborhood.
At full build-out, the project would deliver approximately 9,500 residential units, 1,309 hotel rooms, and 25 acres of public parks and open space. Twenty percent of the residential units, roughly 1,900 homes, are designated affordable, an unusual mandate for a privately funded development of this scale.
Phase one, valued at $500 million and targeted for completion in 2028, centers on a 6,000-seat music hall projected to host 150 events annually, alongside a 180-key boutique hotel, retail space, and two parking garages with rooftop green space. The Chicago City Council unanimously approved the project in early 2025, later greenlighting a $55 million property tax break tied to the first phase.
The entire $7 billion commitment is private capital. The Reinsdorf and Wirtz families, who own the Bulls and Blackhawks, are absorbing the development risk directly, without public stadium subsidies underwriting the bet. One key piece remains unresolved: a proposed CTA Pink Line station on Paulina Street that would connect the Near West Side to Chicago’s broader transit network.
That transit link matters because it points to what separates this project from its predecessors. The Battery Atlanta was built for fans and corporate tenants. The 1901 Project is designed to function for the people who already live nearby, and if executed successfully, it gives every city sitting on an underused arena surrounded by parking a different kind of blueprint to work from.
Do Robotaxis Improve Traffic?
As the national robotaxi rollout scales, many observers hope autonomous fleets will finally ease traffic in major cities, a belief rooted in early technological optimism that widespread deployment could shrink car ownership and drastically reduce urban congestion.
However, a new study from the MIT Transit Lab reveals that Waymo’s commercial robotaxis actually spend nearly half of their miles driving completely empty, challenging that long-held industry belief. By analyzing California Public Utilities Commission data from August 2023 through December 2025, researcher Awad Abdelhalim tracked the rapid scaling of Waymo. Over this roughly 1,000-day period, the company completed 13.8 million trips and carried 19.3 million passengers, growing at an average rate of 15 percent each month.
Despite this massive expansion, the proportion of miles driven with an actual passenger onboard plateaued at around 56 percent. This means approximately 44 percent of the fleet’s total 86.3 million miles were logged as “deadheading,” where empty electric vehicles either roam the streets waiting for a fare or drive to a pickup location.
These findings indicate that robotaxis offer little difference in congestion management when compared to traditional ride-hailing companies like Uber and Lyft, which average a similar 40 percent deadhead rate.
A separate analysis by Matthew Raifman at UC Berkeley confirmed this 44 percent empty-mile figure, noting that two-thirds of those miles were spent with robotaxis simply cruising around waiting for customer assignments.
While Waymo successfully reduced its micro-level inefficiencies—cutting average deadhead miles per trip from 5.1 down to 2.8 as it introduced freeway service and expanded its fleet—the sheer volume of new trips completely offset these gains, leaving the overall percentage of empty cars on the road unchanged.
The data also highlights a unique paradox regarding the industry’s safety claims. While Waymo’s data shows fewer crashes and lower insurance claims than human drivers, the study notes that robotaxis average just 1.4 passengers per trip. Because they rarely facilitate shared rides, they naturally carry fewer occupants than staffed ride-hailing vehicles, which mathematically lowers the expected injury rate per mile.
Living-as-a-Service Could Disrupt the Apartment Leasing Model
The standard apartment lease — a 12-month commitment with separate utility bills, no furniture, and a penalty for leaving early — hasn’t meaningfully changed in decades. Now, with the U.S. rental market expanding rapidly, major real estate consultants are questioning whether that model is overdue for a fundamental rethink.
A May 2026 report from the Deloitte Center for Financial Services forecasts that U.S. renter households could grow by as much as 21.7% by 2035, reaching 56.3 million from today’s 46.2 million, roughly 10 million net new households over the next decade.
It’s against that backdrop that Deloitte is proposing a new operating model for the multifamily housing industry: Living-as-a-Service, or LaaS. The concept borrows from the software industry’s SaaS playbook. Rather than signing a fixed lease and separately managing utilities, furniture, and maintenance, renters would pay a single itemized monthly subscription covering all of it. Units come fully or partially furnished, and tenants can transfer to another unit within a landlord’s portfolio — across buildings or cities — with just 30 to 60 days’ notice.
For large multifamily operators, centralizing utility contracts, maintenance, and technology platforms across many properties lowers per-unit costs while opening new revenue streams beyond base rent. Deloitte notes that even modest adoption of bundled services across a large portfolio could generate meaningful revenue increases. Retention improves too — turnover currently costs owners around $4,000 per unit in vacancy loss, concessions, and make-ready expenses. For renters, the appeal is straightforward: one subscription replaces the usual scramble to set up internet, gas, and electricity at a new address, eliminates the hassle of moving furniture, and allows living arrangements to shift as circumstances change.
However, real challenges remain. LaaS is still early-stage — Deloitte has been exploring it with multifamily clients for roughly a year, but no national operator has committed to a rollout. Transparent billing will be critical to avoid regulatory scrutiny over hidden fees.
The demographic forces behind the concept are well-documented. The median age of first-time homebuyers has risen to 40, up from the late 20s in the 1980s, and high-net-worth renter households more than tripled between 2019 and 2023.
AvalonBay and Equity Residential — whose recent merger created a 180,000-unit portfolio — represent the kind of multi-city operator Deloitte sees as best positioned to move first. On the demand side, recent college graduates may be the most natural early adopters: student housing has already embraced many of LaaS’s defining features, including bundled utilities and furnished units.
Riyadh Is Trying to Cool Itself Down by 15°C
Saudi Arabia is moving forward with one of the most ambitious urban cooling efforts ever attempted, targeting a reduction in surface temperatures across Riyadh by as much as 15°C (a 27°F reduction).
Achieving that at the scale of an entire capital city, through a single coordinated strategy, has no clear precedent. To be fair, Riyadh’s stated 8–15°C reduction target refers to surface temperature — roads, walls, pavements — not ambient air temperature, which swings far less dramatically. But the ambition is still significant.
A global study of 806 cities found that increasing tree canopy reduces land surface temperature by only around 1.5°C on average. Trees alone won’t come close.
The Royal Commission for Riyadh City has appointed consulting firm PLANET as lead consultant. PLANET’s mandate includes developing a comprehensive city cooling strategy, drafting urban planning and construction guidelines, and selecting five pilot zones where solutions will be tested before any citywide rollout. The study phase is expected to take 12 months.
The project targets the urban heat island effect — the tendency of dense cities to run significantly hotter than surrounding areas due to heat-absorbing infrastructure and building materials. Riyadh’s rapid expansion has made this a pressing concern.
Proposed interventions include innovative road-surfacing materials, open water channels, evaporation ponds, and expanded green cover. The strategy also addresses building facades and pedestrian surfaces, essentially rethinking how the city’s physical fabric interacts with heat at every layer.
The project is intended to complement existing initiatives like King Salman Park, but at a fundamentally different level of ambition — targeting the design and construction logic of the city itself rather than layering greenery onto existing spaces.
Implementation is expected to begin next year, pending final approvals. No cost estimates have been disclosed. One noted downstream benefit: reducing surface heat is expected to lower air conditioning energy demand across affected zones, adding an efficiency dimension to what is primarily a livability initiative.
Big Deals
- Voltera and Revel merge to scale heavy EV charging infrastructure.
- Helion raises $465M to build fusion power plant for Microsoft.
- Berkshire Hathaway acquires Taylor Morrison for $6.8B to expand in housing.
- TYKO Capital provides $870M loan for construction of Four Seasons Private Residences Lake Austin.
- Avaada secures $950M financing for FDRE and solar projects in India.
- SL Green sells NYC’s 10 East 53rd Street tower for $312M.
- Maxwell Power raises $750M to finance solar-plus-storage projects.
- TPG-led investor group acquires grocery-anchored retail leader ECHO Realty.
- Inox Clean buys 6 GW of Indian renewables from Vena Energy.
- Focused Energy raises $240M for laser-powered fusion tech.
Extra Reads
- India’s total fertility rate fell below replacement level, dropping to 1.9 children per woman.
- Alphabet plans to raise $80B to pay for AI buildout.
- Data centers raise temperatures up to 4 degrees in nearby neighborhoods.
- A cheap fix for urban crime.
- Turkey plans rail corridor that bypasses the Strait of Hormuz.
- Canada and Québec announce landmark $10B infrastructure partnership.
- HUD says homelessness has surged 27% since 2013.
- Gold Coast, Australia greenlights $1B mixed-use masterplan.
- How land pooling solves land acquisition woes in India.
- $16B Stargate data center campus breaks ground in Michigan.
- Used Waymo robotaxi batteries become backup storage for power grids.
- 1GW clean energy campus to power new Google Texas data center.
- AirTrunk commits $30B to build 5GW of AI data centers in India.
- California tests ocean desalination 1,400 feet down.