Designing Suburban Futures

Suburbs deserve a better, more resilient future. June Williamson shows that suburbs aren't destined to remain filled with strip malls and excess parking lots; they can be reinvigorated through inventive design. Today, dead malls, aging office parks, and blighted apartment complexes are being retrofitted into walkable, sustainable communities.

Williamson provides a broad vision of suburban reform based on the best schemes submitted in Long Island's highly successful "Build a Better Burb" competition. Many of the design ideas and plans operate at a regional scale, tackling systems such as transit, aquifer protection, and power generation. While some seek to fundamentally transform development patterns, others work with existing infrastructure to create mixed-use, shared networks.

Designing Suburban Futures offers concrete but visionary strategies to take the sprawl out of suburbia, creating a vibrant new, suburban form.

Auteur

June Williamson is Associate Professor in the Spitzer School of Architecture at The City College of New York and co-authored Retrofitting Suburbia with Ellen Dunham Jones.

Contenu

Preface

Foreword Ellen Dunham-Jones

Introduction

Context for Change

Design Culture Responds to Sprawl: 1960s to 2010s

Better Suburban Futures

Build a Better Burb 2010: Instructions and Commentary

Winning and Noteworthy Competition Schemes

Sited in the Setback: Increasing Density in Levittown

Upcycling 2.0

AgIsland

Building C-Burbia

SUBHUB Transit System

Long Division

LIRR: Long Island Radically Rezoned

Noteworthy Competition Schemes

Conclusion

Epilogue: New Roles for Architecture and Urban Design. A conversation with Kazys Varnelis

Selected Bibliography

Credits

Index.