Ellen Dunham-Jones
"Retrofitting Suburbia for Urgent Challenges"
Professor, Director Urban Design Program, Georgia Tech
Lecture: Wednesday, March 20, 2024 | 6:00PM | ARCH 132 DF Pray Lecture Theatre
How do you retrofit dead malls, vacant big box stores, dying commercial strip corridors and aging office parks into more equitable, healthy, and resilient places? These underperforming suburban property types are providing critical opportunities to address the challenges of climate change, public health, affordability, social capital and accessibility that the suburbs were never designed for. Drawing on her database of over 1500 successful and 1000 proposed retrofits across the country, Ellen Dunham-Jones will provide present case studies that are meeting both rapidly changing generational preferences and these urgent challenges.
Ellen Dunham-Jones is a professor of architecture and directs the MS in Urban Design at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. She hosts the REDESIGNING CITIES podcast series and was recognized in 2017 and 2023 by Planetizen as one of the 100 most influential urbanists ever. She is co-author with June Williamson of a pair of pioneering and award winning books: Case Studies in Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Strategies for Urgent Challenges (Wiley, 2021) and Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs, (Wiley, 2009, 2011). Their documentation of aging, parking lot-dominated shopping malls, office parks, etc into more sustainable places has been featured in The New York Times, TED, NPR and other prominent venues. She is a Fellow of the Congress for the New Urbanism as well as the Brook Byers Institute of Sustainable Systems, maintains a unique database on suburban retrofits, lectures and consults widely.
Return to Cummings School of Architecture Events Series