The intersection of transportation and real estate will be a focal point of the upcoming University of Michigan/Urban Land Institute Real Estate Forum scheduled for November. The annual conference - returning to Ann Arbor this year - will share a joint session with the yearly meeting held by U-M's Sustainable Mobility & Accessibility Research & Transformation or SMART.

"We just thought it was a perfect match," said Sue Zielinski, managing director of SMART. "There are emerging business opportunities in making transportation more sophisticated in an urbanizing world."

One of the joint sessions will feature a mapping exercise that plots transit nodes and is partly meant to reveal real estate development opportunities. Zielinski (who discussed SMART in a recent AnnArbor.com article) said a similar exercise in Washington, D.C., pinpointed several places where transportation systems overlapped.

"These places can be linked with real estate development or infill or redevelopment," she said. "There's a huge opportunity now with growing urbanization in locating places where development and transportation systems link."

Don Taylor, development director for the U-M Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, which puts on the ULI forum, said the mapping exercise is a concrete example of the way transportation and real estate development are intertwined.

"We're thinking it's going to be an eye-opener for everybody," he said.

The ULI forum is scheduled for Nov. 11-12. Speakers include Republican gubernatorial candidate Rick Snyder; Wayne Doran, former leader of Ford Land; and Chuck DiRocco of ULI, who will present the institute's report "Emerging Trends in Real Estate 2010."

The overall theme of the conference this year is "Preparing for the New Real Estate Reality," which Taylor said is focused to a large extent on infill development.

"That's clearly the message we've been talking about," he said. "Even in the suburbs the focus is on transit ... we cannot continue to have sprawl, we can't afford to build highways to nowhere."

Zielinski said holding joint sessions of the ULI and SMART conferences will help build the ability to see across disciplines to a global viewpoint.

"The capacity to connect these dots and to fill in a whole system is interesting," she said.

Freelance reporter Dan Meisler can be reached at danmeisler@gmail.com.