Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat Opens Texas Chapter, to Host 2026 Americas Conference

There may be no place on Earth better suited to address the questions of modern urbanism than Texas. Despite global trends of economic volatility, high downtown vacancy rates, digitization, AI, climate change, and more, the Texas Triangle of Dallas-Fort Worth, Austin, San Antonio, and Houston continues to boom. Year after year, these metropolitan areas each vie to be among the fastest growing in the US, and Houston inches closer to overtaking Chicago as the nation’s third most populous city. With space at an increasing premium, Texas finds itself in a unique position to define the essential character and function of the 21st-century metroplex. 

 It is with this in mind that the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) recently established its newest chapter in Texas. Originally founded as an authority on building statistics (it’s website will tell you, for example, that Houston will likely become the nation’s third tallest city as soon as it becomes its third most populous), CTBUH has since flowered into a nonprofit focused on sustainable, densified, healthy urban growth. Through conferences, research, publications, and advocacy, the organization engages a member network of more than 2 million professionals working in all building industry sectors worldwide.

The significance of the Texas chapter has been rapidly recognized by CTBUH. In 2026, the CTBUH Americas conference will be held in Austin. Here, the organization seeks to provide a forum all those invested in tall buildings and urban habitat—policymakers, urban planners, architects, owners, and developers—to gain insights into the latest thinking in sustainable development. 

At the 2023 CTBUH global conference in Singapore, 1,200 attendees met under the banner of “humanizing high density.” Singapore has been a leader in this space, wedding investments in affordable housing and integrated communities with incentives to create public space “at height.” Iconic designs such as the CapitaSpring skyscraper, with its almost 100,000 sf of greenspace, showcase the vision of the “garden city” as a true urban landscape. Last year, CTBUH met in London and Paris to discuss the challenges of new versus renewed buildings. With the United Nations projecting nearly 70 percent urbanization by 2050, CTBUH seeks to learn from lessons at a global scale—proactively, rather than reactively.

Texas has weathered economic shifts in its history—in cotton, cattle, and lumber. At the wake of the global green transition, AI, and the “work-from-anywhere” office model, similar shifts may loom for the energy and service markets. Houston, our largest and most lateral city, is a case study. With the city facing unprecedented increases in both office vacancies and population growth, nascent developments like More Space: Main Street and the long-planned I-45 rebuild look to reassess Houston’s essential urban character. Having found its fortune between the Gulf and the stars, Space City now turns its attention to all the space chartered between. What should go between the on ramp and the off ramp? Between the lobby and the penthouse? How do we marry “city as economic engine” with “city as urban habitat”? CTBUH Texas seeks to get ahead of these questions.

At the upcoming Austin conference, CTBUH will look to the future of sustainable, densified urbanism in Texas. The organization seeks to host quarterly events that rotate around Austin, Dallas, and Houston, as well as roundtable discussions with like-minded organizations.  Read more about the Texas Chapter at www.skyscrapercenter.com/city/austin/events.