CHICAGO-About 1,000 commercial real estate executives attended the kick-off day of CoreNet Global’s Spring Summit here at Navy Pier Monday, many in hopes of determining new solutions for attracting and keeping new corporate clients. The first day of the two-day event included some expected news, such as reports that companies are again hiring, and unexpected, such as “Aerotropolis” author Greg Lindsay’s talk of new city hubs to a surprising proposed tenant for McCaffery’s $4-billion Lakeside project.

Lindsay started the day with a keynote talk about how future city development will likely be faster than in the past century, will include planning for all uses and may use an airport as the central hub of business. Companies looking to expand can also follow this model, he said, focusing on interconnected hubs rather than one central headquarters office.

Later, in a standing-room only breakout session, Fortune 500 tenant spokespersons and a Studley representative talked about how corporations will now face growth issues in the coming years. The tenant reps included Sanjiv Awasthi with Pfizer Inc., Sara Baldi with Kaiser Permanente, Robert Ripp with Morgan Stanley and Wayne Taub with Time Warner; joined by Christelle Bron, managing director of corporate services for Studley.

One thing all agreed upon--change is constant, especially today. Awasthi said when he started at Pfizer, the firm had 25 offices, and now has 160, whereas Taub said Time Warner has shrunk, due to sales and consolidations, from 86,000 employees to 33,000. The panelists also agreed that proactive space planning is necessary to provide today to the corporate offices, requiring massive data collection and projections, all which are difficult to achieve in large firms where data can conflict from department to department.

“You have to have standard processes to compare apples to apples,” Awasthi said. He said his firm tries to focus on three variables: internal information, such as headcounts and spoken growth needs, industry business trends and real estate trends. A collection of these variables, as well as a serious of one-, three- and five-year projections, can provide a front office with recommendations for decisions, he said.

 A later breakout session addressed how to bring tenants to brownfield properties, with the case study of the Lakeside project, a redevelopment of a massive former US Steel plant on Chicago’s South Side. McCaffery is working with the company to rebuild the site, with a massive mixed-use project planned that would create neighborhoods and parks along Lake Michigan, though currently surrounded by blight and distress.

Though the project will likely take about 40 years to rebuild, and it still hasn’t fully signed a tenant, Lakeside is praised by city leaders and developers as a prime example of reuse. Panelist Kimberly Worthington, deputy commissioner for the Chicago Department of Environment, said that virtually every new development, or redevelopment, in the city will be scrutinized for sustainable practices. “We look at all projects as to how they fit with the Chicago Climate Action Plan,” Worthington said. “If a project follows LEED or other green initiatives, this is something we want to help put together.”

Nasutsa Mabwa, project manager for Lakeside, talked about how the city assisted in a temporary zoning change to allow a Dave Matthews Band concert this year on the site. She also let slip that her office is looking into another “star” potential tenant. “We’re looking into what it would take to host an Obama Presidential Library,” she said. “We’re reaching out to educational institutions to see what that would take, it would be great to have it located here in his hometown.”

Mabwa tells GlobeSt.com that there have been a few letters of intent for the property, and the firm is looking for retailers to join the project. “We plan to meet with some firms at the ICSC ReCon event later this month, and hope we can announce some tenants after that,” she says.