Traffic congestion, endless construction, flooded streets and power outages. For city leaders and residents alike, these disruptions are simply part of daily urban life. But an emerging tool, known as the urban digital twin, could help cities anticipate problems before they occur by allowing planners to simulate responses, stress-test infrastructure, and evaluate decisions before implementing them in the real world.
A single hairline crack in a bridge deck can seem insignificant. But left undetected, minor cracks and fissures expand, water seeps in, steel corrodes and repair costs start to increase. This risk multiplies across thousands of miles of aging highways and bridges nationwide.
As infrastructure endures increasing strain from heavier traffic, extreme weather and deferred maintenance, engineers are exploring “self-healing” systems, where streets and bridges are built with materials that can repair themselves. Concrete, asphalt and composites capable of detecting and mending microcracks autonomously are moving from laboratory research to pilot projects. But while emerging technology promises longer-lasting infrastructure, it also raises questions about long-term maintenance, performance guarantees, procurement frameworks and risk allocation.
Construction “gigaprojects” are initiatives with expenses of well over $1 billion and which involve time periods of well over five years. They are engagements whose extraordinary size, duration and complexity might induce even the most seasoned of project professionals to rethink how they “do contracts.” The prospect of a gigaproject does not so much raise new questions as call for the careful reconsideration of otherwise established answers. What alternative forms of contracting might one use, how might they allocate economic and project risks, and what compensation might drive the parties’ behavior?
In the newest episode of Resilience, Pillsbury’s Shellka Arora-Cox and Brookfield Asset Management’s Brian Callahan discuss one of the most dynamic corners of the energy and infrastructure market: private debt.
This week’s round-up explores decreasing home sales, electric vehicle charging stations, office occupancy levels, and more.
This week’s round-up explores backlog shifts in the nonresidential construction sector, updates from the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine, lithium-ion battery storage issues in New York City, and more.
This week’s round-up dives into NFT fractionalization and its potential benefit to increase accessibility in real estate investing, lobbying efforts surrounding Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) funding, experimental retail spaces, and more.
This week’s round-up features green financing of hotels, efforts of the European Union to protect critical infrastructure, initiatives surrounding the IIJA to advance equity for historically disadvantaged businesses, and more.
This week’s round-up features how industries tangentially related to the housing market could be affected by its downturn, how the Biden Administration’s plans to invest IIJA funds, cybersecurity considerations for commercial property owners, and more.
Europe’s energy infrastructure struggles under record heat waves, Wall Street tightens commercial real estate lending, blockchain technology and NFTs (non-fungible tokens) continue to transform real estate ownership, and more.
Gravel2Gavel Construction & Real Estate Law Blog