Retrofitting suburbia Ellen DunhamJones

we’ve had the last 50 years we’ve been

building the suburbs with a lot of

unintended consequences and I’m going to

talk about some of those consequences

and just present a whole bunch of really

interesting projects that I think gave

us tremendous reasons to be really

optimistic that the big design and

development project of the next 50 years

is going to be retrofitting suburbia so

whether it’s redeveloping dying malls or

Rhian habitated big-box stores or

reconstructing wetlands out of parking

lots I think the fact is the growing

number of empty and underperforming read

especially retail sites throughout

suburbia gives us actually a tremendous

opportunity to take our least

sustainable landscapes right now and

convert them into more sustainable

places and in the process what that

allows us to do is to redirect a lot

more of our growth back into existing

communities that could use a boost and

have the infrastructure in place instead

of continuing to tear down trees and

tear up the green space out at the edges

so why is this important I think there

are any number of reasons and I’m just

gonna not get into detail but mention a

few just from the perspective of climate

change the average urban dweller in the

US has about one-third the carbon

footprint of the average suburban

dweller mostly because suburban nights

drive a lot more and living in a

detached buildings you have that much

more exterior surface to leak energy out

of so it’s you know strictly from a

climate change perspective on the cities

are already relatively green the big

opportunity to reduce greenhouse gas

emission

is actually in urbanizing the suburbs

all that driving that we’ve been doing

out in the suburbs we have doubled the

amount of miles we drive it’s increased

our dependence on foreign oil despite

the gains in fuel efficiency we’re just

driving so much more we haven’t been

able to keep up technologically Public

Health is another reason to consider

retrofitting researchers at the CDC and

other places have increasingly been

linking suburban development patterns

with sedentary lifestyles and those have

been linked then with the rather

alarming growing rates of obesity shown

in these maps here and that obesity has

also been triggering great increases in

heart disease and diabetes to the point

where today a child born today has a one

in three chance of developing diabetes

and that rate has been escalating at the

same rate as children not walking to

school anymore again because of our

development patterns and then there’s

finally there’s the affordability

question

I mean how affordable is it to continue

to live in suburbia with rising gas

prices we suburban expansion to cheap

land for the last 50 years

you know the cheap land out on the edge

has helped generations of families enjoy

the American dream but increasingly the

savings promised by Drive till you

qualify affordability which is basically

our model those savings are wiped out

when you consider the transportation

costs for instance here in Atlanta about

half of households make between 20,000

and 50,000 a year and they are spending

29 percent of their income on housing

and 32 percent on transportation I mean

that’s two thousand five figures that’s

before we got up to the four bucks a

gallon you know none of us really tend

to do the math on our transportation

costs and they’re not going down anytime

soon

whether you love suburbia zli fee

privacy or you

it’s soulless commercial strips there

are reasons why it’s important to

retrofit but is it practical I think it

is June Williamson and I have been

researching this topic for over a decade

and we found over 80 varied projects but

they’re really all market driven and

what’s driving the market in particular

number one is a major demographic shifts

we all tend to think of suburbia as this

very family focused place but that’s

really not the case anymore since 2000

already two-thirds of households in

suburbia did not have kids in them we’re

just we haven’t caught up with the

actual the realities of this the reasons

for this have a lot to do with the

dominance of the two big demographic

groups right now are the baby boomers

retiring and then then there’s a gap the

Generation X which is a small generation

there’s they’re still having kids but

Generation Y hasn’t even really started

hitting child-rearing age there they end

up another big generation but so as a

result of that demographers predict that

through 2025 75 to 85 percent of new

households will not have kids in them

and then the market research consumer

research of asking the the boomers and

Gen Y what it is they’re they would like

what would they like to live in and

plush tells us that there is going to be

a huge demand and already it we’re

already seeing it but for more urban

lifestyles within suburbia that

basically the boomers want to be able to

age in place and Gen Y would like to

live an urban lifestyle but most of

their jobs will continue to be out in

suburbia the other big dynamic of change

is the sheer performance of

underperforming as fault I keep thinking

this would be a great name for an indie

rock band but developers generally use

it to refer to just underused parking

lots and suburbia is full of them

when the post-war suburbs were first

built out on the cheap land away from

downtown it made sense to just build

surface parking lots but those sites

have now been leapfrogged and

leapfrogged again as we’ve just

continued to sprawl and they now have a

relatively central location

it no longer just makes sense that land

is more valuable than just surface

parking lots it now makes sense to go

back in build a deck and build up on on

those sites so what do you do with a

dead mall dead office Park um it turns

out all sorts of things in a slow

economy like ours

Riaan habitation is one of the more

popular strategies so this happens to be

a dead mall in st. Louis that’s been

Rhian habited as art space it’s now home

to artists studios theater groups dance

troupes it’s not pulling in as much tax

revenue is it once was but it’s serving

its community it’s keeping the lights on

you know it’s it’s becoming it’s it’s I

think a really great institution other

malls have been rien habited as nursing

homes as universities and it’s all

variety of office space we also found a

lot of examples of dead big-box stores

that have been converted into all sorts

of community serving uses as well lots

of schools lots of churches and lots of

libraries like this one this was a

little a grocery store Food Lion grocery

store that is now a public library in

addition to I think doing a beautiful

adaptive reuse they tore up some of the

parking spaces put in bio swales to

collect and clean the runoff put in a

lot more parking sidewalks to connect to

the neighborhoods you know and they’ve

made this what was just a store along a

commercial strip into a community

gathering space this one is a little

l-shaped strip shopping center in

Phoenix Arizona really all they did was

they gave it a fresh coat of bright

paint a gourmet grocery and they put

Sarat in the old post office never

underestimate the power of food to turn

a place around and make it a destination

it’s been so successful they’ve now

taken over the strip across the street

and the name of the real estate ads in

the neighborhood all very proudly

proclaimed walking distance to La Grande

Lodge because it provided its

neighborhood with what sociologists like

to call a third place if home is the

first place and work is the second place

the third place is where you go to hang

out and build community and especially

as suburbia is becoming less centered on

the family and family households there’s

a real hunger for more third places so

the most dramatic retrofits are really

those in the next category the next

strategy redevelopment during the boom

there were several really dramatic

redevelopment projects where the

original building was scraped to the

ground and then the whole site was

rebuilt at significantly greater density

is sort of compact walkable urban

neighborhoods but some of them have been

much more incremental this is Mashpee

Commons the oldest retrofit that we

found and it’s just incrementally over

the last 20 years built urbanism on top

of its parking lots so the black and

white photo shows the simple 60s strip

shopping center and then the maps above

that show its gradual transformation

into a compact mixed-use New England

village and it has plans now that have

been approved for - for it to connect to

new neighbor residential neighborhoods

across the arterials and over on the

other side so you know sometimes it’s

incremental sometimes it’s all at once

this is another infill project on the

parking lots this one of an office park

outside of Washington DC when Metro Rail

expanded transit into the suburbs and

opened as a station nearby to this site

the owners decided to you know build a

new parking deck and then insert on top

of their surface lots a new Main Street

several

apartments and condo buildings while

keeping the existing office buildings

here is the site in 1940 it was just a

little farm in the village of

Hyattsville by 1980 it had been

subdivided into a big mall on one side

the office park on the other and then

some buffer sites for a library and a

church to the far right today the

transit the main street and the new

housing have all been built eventually I

expect that the streets will probably

extend through a redevelopment of the

mall plans have already been announced

for a lot of those garden apartments

above the mall to be redeveloped I mean

transit is a big driver of retrofits so

here’s what it looks like you can sort

of see the funky new condo buildings in

between the office buildings in the

public space and the new Main Street

this one is one of my favorites

Belmar I think they really built an

attractive place here and if just

employed all green construction there’s

massive PV arrays on the roofs as well

as wind turbines this was a very large

mall on a hundred acre super block it’s

now 22 walkable urban blocks with public

streets to public parks eight bus lines

and a range of housing types and so it’s

really given Lakewood Colorado the

downtown that this particular sub this

suburb never had here was the mall and

its heyday they had their prom in the

mall they loved their mall so here’s the

site in 1975 with the mall by 1995 the

mall has died the department store has

been kept and we found this was true in

many cases the department stores are

multi-story they’re better build they’re

easy to be readapted but the one-story

stuff it’s really history so here it is

at projected build-out this project I

think has great connectivity to the

existing neighborhoods it’s providing

1,500 households with the option of a

more urban lifestyle it’s about

two-thirds built out right now here’s

what the new Main Street looks like it’s

very successful and it’s up to prom

eight of the 13 regional malls in Denver

have now or have announced plans to be

retrofitted but it’s important to note

that all of this retrofitting is not

occurring just you know bulldozers are

coming and just plowing down the whole

city no its pockets of walkability on

the sites of underperforming properties

and so it’s giving people more choices

but it’s not taking away choices but

it’s also not really enough to just

create pockets of walkability you want

to also try to get more systemic

transformation we need to also retrofit

the corridors themselves so this is one

that has been retrofitted in California

they took the commercial strip shown on

the Glock and white images below and

they built a Boulevard that has become

the main street for their town and it’s

transformed from being an ugly unsafe

undesirable address to becoming a

beautiful attractive dignified sort of

good address I mean now we’re hoping

we’ll get start to see it they’ve

already built City Hall tracked it to

hotels I mean I could imagine beautiful

housing going up along there without

tearing down another tree so there’s a

lot of great things but you know I’d

love to see more corridors getting

retrofitting but densification is not

going to work everywhere sometimes

re-greening is really you know the

better the better answer there’s a lot

to learn from successful land banking

programs in cities like Flint Michigan

there’s also a burgeoning suburban

farming movement sort of Victory Gardens

meets the internet but perhaps one of

the most important regrading aspects is

the opportunity to restore the local

ecology as in this example outside of

Minneapolis when the shopping center

died the city restored the site’s

original wetlands creating lakefront

property which then attracted private

investment the first private investment

to this very low-income neighborhood in

over 40 years

so they’ve managed to both restore the

local ecology and the local economy at

the same time

this is another regrading example it

also makes sense in very strong markets

this one in Seattle is on the site of a

mall parking lot adjacent to a new

transit stop and the wavy line is a path

alongside a creek that has now been

daylit the creek had been culvert it

under the parking lot but daylighting

our creeks really improves their water

quality and contributions to habitat so

so I’ve shown you some of the first

generation of retrofits what’s next I

think we have three challenges for the

future the first is to plan retrofitting

much more systemically at the

metropolitan scale we need to be able to

target which areas really should be

regained

where should we be redeveloping and

where should we be encouraging Rhian

habitation these slides just show two

images from a larger project that looked

at trying to do that for Atlanta I was

led a team that was asked to imagine

Atlanta hundred years from now and we

chose to try to reverse sprawl through

three simple moves expensive but simple

one in a hundred years transit on all

major rail and road corridors two in a

hundred years

thousand foot buffers on all stream

corridors it’s a little extreme but

we’ve got a little water problem in a

hundred years subdivisions that simply

end up too close to water or too far

from transit or won’t be viable and so

we created the Eco acre transfer to

transfer development rights and to the

transit corridors and allow the

regrading of those former subdivisions

for food and energy production so the

the second challenge is to improve the

architectural design quality of the

retrofits and I close with this image of

democracy in action this is a protest

that’s happening on a retrofit in Silver

Springs Maryland on an astroturf town

Green now retrofits are often accused of

being examples of faux downtown

and instant urbanism and not without

reason you don’t get much more funny

than an astroturf town green I have to

say these are very hybrid places they

are new but trying to look old

they have urban Street scapes but

suburban parking ratios their

populations are more diverse than

typical suburbia but they’re less

diverse than cities and there they are

public places but that are managed by

private companies and just the surface

appearances are often like the astroturf

here are you know they make me wince so

you know I mean I’m glad the urbanism is

doing its job the fact that a protest is

happening really it does mean that the

layout of the blocks the streets and

blocks the putting in of public space

compromised as it may be and you know is

still a really great thing but we just

we’ve got to get the architecture better

the final challenge is for all of you I

want you to join the protest and start

demanding more sustainable place

suburban places more sustainable places

period but you know culturally we tend

to think that downtown’s should be

dynamic and we expect that but we seem

to have an expectation that the suburbs

should forever remain frozen in whatever

adolescent form they were first given

birth to it’s time to let them grow up

so I want you to all support the zoning

changes the road diets the

infrastructure improvements and the

retrofits that are coming soon to a

neighborhood near you thank you