A brand-new collection of 32 case studies that further demonstrate the retrofitting of suburbia This amply-illustrated book, second in a series, documents how defunct shopping malls, parking lots, and the past century's other obsolete suburban development patterns are being retrofitted to address current urgent challenges they weren't designed for: improving public health, increasing resilience in the face of climate change, leveraging social capital for equity, supporting an aging society, competing for jobs, and disrupting automobile dependence. Case Studies in Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Strategies for Urgent Challenges provides summaries, data, and references on how these challenges manifest in suburbia and discussion of successful urban design strategies to address them in Part I. Part II documents how innovative design strategies are implemented in a range of northern American contexts and market conditions. From modest interventions with big ripple effects to ambitious do-overs, examples of redevelopment, reinhabitation, and regreening of changing suburban places from coast to coast are described in depth in 32 brand new case studies. Written by the authors of the highly influential Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs Demonstrates changes that can and already have been realized in suburbia by focusing on case studies of retrofitted suburban places Illustrated in full-color with photos, maps, plans, and diagrams Full of replicable lessons and creative responses to ongoing problems and potentials with conventional suburban form, Case Studies in Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Strategies for Urgent Challenges is an important book for students and professionals involved in urban design, architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, development, civil engineering, public health, public policy, and governance. Most of all, it is intended as a useful guide for anyone who seeks to inspire revitalization, justice, and shared prosperity in places they know and care about.

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. Drawing on award-winning design ideas for revitalizing Long Island, she offers valuable models not only for U.S. suburbs, but also those emerging elsewhere with global urbanization.
Williamson argues that suburbia has historically been a site of great experimentation and is currently primed for exciting changes. Today, dead malls, aging office parks, and blighted apartment complexes are being retrofitted into walkable, sustainable communities. Williamson shows how to expand this trend, highlighting promising design strategies and tactics.
She 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. It will be especially useful for urban designers, architects, landscape architects, land use planners, local policymakers and NGOs, citizen activists, students of urban design, planning, architecture, and landscape architecture.

All across the world a uniform, homogeneous model of development, inspired by Los Angeles style urban sprawl--consisting of massive freeways, parking lots, shopping malls, and large-scale masterplanned communities with golf courses--is being stamped onto the earth's topography. This globalized model of architecture does not respect or adapt itself to the natural or cultural environment onto which it is implanted.

German American photographer Robert Harding Pittman began working on this project in Los Angeles ten years ago. Since then he has been photographing the spread of "L.A. style development" in Las Vegas, Spain, France, Germany, Greece, Dubai, and South Korea.