Urban advantage: Lessons learned in leveraging location to create innovation engines

Don’t let your campus strategy treat location as a constraint — in today’s research landscape, breakthroughs don’t just come from funding or talent, they come from ecosystems. This session presents a candid, execution-focused look at how NYU Tandon School of Engineering has turned New York City’s density, proximity, and transit access into measurable drivers of research growth. Drawing on real-world capital projects in a high-intensity urban environment, Maey Khaled and Michael O'Neill deliver a data-driven framework for integrating location intelligence into capital project prioritization, vertical planning, adaptive reuse, and shared infrastructure. They outline a replicable playbook to assess campus positioning, align facilities investments with research ROI, and convert location from a fixed constraint into a competitive advantage.