Retrofitting Suburbia
February 24th, 2009 | Metropolitan Exchanges
Tuesday Feb. 24, 7 PM
a talk by June Williamson, RA, LEED AP
June Williamson is co-author, with Ellen Dunham-Jones, of Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solution for Redesigning Suburbs, published by John Wiley & Sons.
The last fifty years have been dominated by the reproduction of sprawl development patterns. The big project for the next fifty years will be retrofitting suburban sprawl into sustainable places. The process has already begun: aging, stand-alone shopping malls and office parks are being transformed into multi-block, mixed-use town centers with public squares and greens. Ambitious new public transit networks are being proposed, constructed, and integrated into rapidly redeveloping suburban contexts. Archaic zoning ordinances are being overhauled to permit higher-density, mixed-use development, especially near transit stations. New housing types are attracting a diverse mix of young professionals, empty nesters, and families.
In Retrofitting Suburbia, Dunham-Jones and Williamson document over 80 suburban retrofits, analyzing the various strategies employed and calling attention to their potential to operate systemically to produce a polycentric pattern they call “incremental metropolitanism.”
About June Williamson:
June Williamson, RA, LEED-AP, is associate professor of architecture at The City College of New York / CUNY. She has held previous appointments at Columbia, Georgia Institute of Technology, and the University of Utah. Her writing has been published in the journals Places and Thresholds, and in the recent anthology Writing Urbanism.