Post by Dimitri Cusnir

What does a WW2 bunker, a working docklands, and an abandoned airport have in common? More than I expected before this trip. Our latest GMRED exploration with IE School of Architecture and Design took us across Hamburg and Berlin, and one through-line became impossible to ignore: real estate development is rarely about the empty plot. It is about what you do with what is already there. You can read about that in a lecture hall. You only feel it standing inside a structure with 3.7-meter-thick floors and empty airfields, wondering how anyone reimagines that into something people actually want to use. 🏗️ Hamburg HafenCity made the case that great districts are engineered, not accidental: "You have to create complexity." BUNKER Hilldegarden turned wartime concrete into public space, proof that adaptive reuse lives or dies on implementation, not vision. The Elbphilharmonie showed how one building can reposition an entire waterfront, while EBS Universität für Wirtschaft und Recht and Union Investment grounded it all in how capital and academia actually read these markets. HafenCity Hamburg GmbH, EBS Universität für Wirtschaft und Recht, Union Investment Real Estate GmbH 🏙️ Berlin JLL gave me a line I keep coming back to: "Every time a door closes, two windows open." Arup made cities in a VUCA world feel less like a forecast and more like something we get to shape. Urban Tech Republic is turning the former Tegel Airport into an innovation hub, and COPRO Group showed how listed buildings can be repositioned for modern life without erasing what made them worth keeping. JLL Germany, @UrbanTechRepublic, COPRO Gruppe That is the part of this field I find genuinely exciting, and the part you can only really understand by showing up. Grateful to everyone who hosted us along the way. Flavio Tejada Gorraiz, Aline Haouy , Andreea Constantin #RealEstate #UrbanDevelopment #AdaptiveReuse #GMRED #IEUniversity