Retrofitting Suburbia Series
“THE BIBLE OF THE RETROFITTING MOVEMENT.”
Our first book in the series, Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs (Wiley 2009, 2011, Mandarin 2013), was deemed “the Bible of the retrofitting movement” in the Chicago Tribune. It was featured in The New York Times, CBS Evening News, Urban Land, Architectural Record, and The Architect’s Newspaper, and received the 2009 PROSE award for architecture and urban planning from the American Association of Publishers.
Our new book, Case Studies in Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Strategies for Urgent Challenges (Wiley 2020) continues the documentation of how defunct shopping malls, office parks, parking lots, and other obsolete suburban development patterns are being retrofitted. This time we address an even broader range of urgent challenges such places weren’t designed for: improving public health, increasing resilience in the face of climate change, leveraging social capital for equity, supporting an aging society, competing for jobs, and disrupting automobile dependence.
Part I provides summaries, data, and references on how these challenges manifest in suburbia and discussion of successful urban design strategies to address them. Part II documents how innovative design strategies are implemented in a range of northern American contexts and market conditions. From modest interventions with big ripple effects to ambitious do-overs, examples of redevelopment, reinhabitation, and regreening of changing suburban places from coast to coast are described in depth in 32 brand new case studies.
Designing Suburban Futures - the second book in the series - provides a broad vision of suburban reform based on the best schemes submitted in Long Island's highly successful "Build a Better Burb" competition. Williamson offers many of the award winning design ideas and plans that operate at a regional scale, tackling systems such as transit, aquifer protection, and power generation. Designing Suburban Futures offers concrete but visionary strategies to take the sprawl out of suburbia, creating a vibrant, new suburban form.
Explore MALL Retrofits Across the Country
Click the map to see which malls have been regreened, reinhabited, or redeveloped—and into what. More guidelines, below.
About June Williamson
June Williamson is professor of architecture at The City College of New York's Spitzer School of Architecture. She has consulted, taught and practiced architecture and urban design in Boston, Salt Lake City, Atlanta, Los Angeles and, currently, New York City. In addition to the book’s co-authored with Ellen Dunham Jones, she wrote "Designing Suburban Futures: New Models from Build a Better Burb," documenting an urban design ideas competition for Long Island.
About Ellen Dunham-Jones
Ellen Dunham-Jones is professor of architecture and directs the urban design degree at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She was voted one of the world’s 100 most influential urbanists by Planetizen and hosts the Redesigning Cities podcast. She welcomes opportunities to engage students in producing retrofit proposals and in-between classes is available to lecture, conduct workshops, consult on projects, and address database research inquiries for a fee.
Our book series and lectures illustrate the urban design strategies 20th century suburban places are using to address contemporary challenges they were not designed for--from equity and affordability to climate change and public health. Ample case studies drawn from our extensive database present the replicable lessons learned for implementing change.