The suburbs are changing. The homogenous picket-fence bedroom communities of decades past are becoming more economically and demographically diverse, less architecturally homogenous, and, unfortunately, more impoverished. They’re also becoming, well, less suburban.
The book was trying to “challenge the dominant paradigm that cities were changing places and suburbs weren’t,” says Williamson.
Things have since gotten a lot more sophisticated, and the transformations happening today present a vision of suburbs that are far more reflective of the social and demographic changes they are experiencing. “Now communities are asking, while you’re reducing automobile dependency, what are you doing for public health, for climate change, for the loneliness epidemic, for any number of these other challenges,” Dunham-Jones says.
Using 32 case studies, Dunham-Jones and Williamson show that places with a suburban form can be retrofitted by focusing on six key areas.
Automobile dependence
Suburbia is still the land of cars. But suburban places can begin to chip away at their car-oriented streets and development patterns.
“If you don’t have transit, people still need cars for the time being,” says Dunham-Jones. “New development is going to come in with parking lots, [so] the number one recommendation is to design your parking lots as future building sites.”
The book points to the example of Mueller, a former municipal airport in Austin, where two decades of planning led to a redevelopment that is transforming more than 700 acres of airstrips and empty space into a new community of more than 6,000 homes.
Public health
If you need a car to get everywhere, you’re probably not walking anywhere. Improving walkability in suburban places can have benefits beyond just changing transportation patterns.
“The potential of suburban retrofitting to transform people’s lives begins at that fundamental level of our bodies and how we move through space,” says Williamson. “The single best thing in terms of public health that would save a lot of money and prolong people’s lives from all different backgrounds is to design physical activity into the environment. At the most basic level, that means opportunities to walk.”
In Normal, Illinois, the city shifted space from drivers to pedestrians in its Uptown Circle project, which transformed an awkward five-street intersection into a traffic-calmed roundabout with a central park. The project also links with a growing network of pedestrian facilities in the surrounding area, creating a new center for the town.
Aging population
Reconsidering suburban places through the lens of older adults can have benefits for residents of all ages. A growing movement is underway in communities to allow residents to age in place by making neighborhoods safer, more accessible, and more connected to goods and services. “Lifelong communities and the kinds of things we might specifically do with older adults in mind can benefit everybody, including the young who may not have the ability to drive or, increasingly, the desire,” says Williamson.
The book points to Bell Works, a redevelopment of the former Bell Labs building in Holmdel, New Jersey, which includes a 55-plus housing community being built on former parking lots. But it’s not just a community for seniors. The Eero Saarinen-designed Bell Labs building now has offices, retail, and dining, all easily accessible by the seniors living nearby and the broader community as well.
Equity
Efforts are being made to update suburban places to be more reflective of their increasingly diverse communities, and these can take many shapes. One example is the Collinwood Recreation Center, a gym and community center built in a former big-box store in an underserved part of Cleveland, where parks and spaces for healthy recreation were needed more than additional retail establishments. Other big-box stores and strip malls have also been converted into community-centric uses, including new fitness centers made from old stores in towns such as Spearfish, North Dakota, and Princeton, New Jersey.
Jobs
Other former retail spaces are being reconfigured to house new types of business. In dying malls and shopping centers, communities are trying to breathe new life into local economies. One example is the Bon Marche Mall in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The mall went out of business in 2000, but local investors turned the space into a technology center that is now a business incubator and data center. Another former strip mall, in DeSoto, Texas, got a similar retrofit and is now a market and business incubator focused specifically on Black-owned businesses.
Water and energy resilience
Suburban retrofits can also achieve environmental goals. The book points to the example of Maplewood Mall, a struggling shopping mall in Maplewood, Minnesota. Surrounded by 35 acres of impervious asphalt, the mall was a major contributor to polluted runoff contaminating local lakes. A retrofit project replaced much of the asphalt with rain gardens, tree trenches, and permeable paving, and the site now absorbs two-thirds of the rainwater that falls there.
Williamson and Dunham-Jones note that all of these projects, and every one of the 32 case studies in their book, target more than just one of these focus areas. Retrofitting suburbs, they argue, has to be much more than just shaking off old stereotypes. “The best retrofits integrate solutions to as many challenges as they can,” says Dunham-Jones.