Professor Continues Retrofitting Suburbia Research
Professor Dunham-Jones Continues Retrofitting Suburbia Research with New Book
March 2, 2021 | Atlanta, GA
Ellen Dunham-Jones, professor and director of the urban design program at Georgia Tech, and June Williamson, Chair and associate professor at the City College of New York Bernard & Anne Spitzer School of Architecture, have spent years researching the challenges faced by suburbs and future of dying malls around the U.S.
Their first book, Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs, was published in 2009, and on January 20, 2021, Dunham-Jones and Williamson announced the publication of the newest book in their Retrofitting Suburbia series, Case Studies in Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Strategies for Urgent Challenges.
"Our ambition [in writing this book] was to engage with a larger, continuing set of challenges, given that suburbia is the United States," said Williamson in a recent article in The New York Times. "Suburbs are us. They're where the majority of people work, where they live."
Case Studies in Retrofitting Suburbia details six challenges currently facing our communities—improving public health, increasing resilience to climate change, leveraging social capital for equity, providing support to an aging society, competing for jobs, and challenging automobile dependence.
"There's surprisingly little written that's useful to aging suburban communities coping with how to evolve. And the literature is often removed from what the suburbs actually are," says Dunham-Jones. "It's stuck in this old trope of suburbs versus city, when really it's not a question of whether suburbs will stay the same or will be turned into something else. Change is occurring anyway."