Retrofitting suburbia

Ellen Dunham-Jones fires the starting shot for the next 50 years' big sustainable design project: retrofitting suburbia. To come: Dying malls rehabilitated, dead "big box" stores re-inhabited, parking lots transformed into thriving wetlands.

In 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 give 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 re-inhabiting dead big-box stores

or reconstructing wetlands

out of parking lots,

I think the fact is

the growing number

of empty and under-performing,

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 to 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 going to not get into detail but mention a few.

Just from the perspective of climate change,

the average urban dweller in the U.S.

has about one-third the carbon footprint

of the average suburban dweller,

mostly because suburbanites drive a lot more,

and living in detached buildings,

you have that much more exterior surface

to leak energy out of.

So strictly from

a climate change perspective,

the cities are already

relatively green.

The big opportunity

to reduce greenhouse gas emissions

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 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?

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 2005 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

any time soon.

Whether you love suburbia's leafy privacy

or you hate its 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've found over 80

varied projects.

But that they're really all market driven,

and what's driving the market in particular --

number one -- is 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 just haven't caught up with the actual realities of this.

The reasons for this have a lot to with

the dominance of the two big

demographic groups right now:

the Baby Boomers retiring --

and then there's a gap,

Generation X, which is a small generation.

They're still having kids --

but Generation Y hasn't even started

hitting child-rearing age.

They're the other big generation.

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 the market research, consumer research,

asking the Boomers and Gen Y

what it is they would like,

what they would like to live in,

tells us there is going to be a huge demand --

and we're already seeing it --

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 asphalt.

Now I keep thinking this would be a great name

for an indie rock band,

but developers generally use it

to refer to underused parking lots --

and suburbia is full of them.

When the postwar 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 those sites.

So what do you do

with a dead mall,

dead office park?

It turns out, all sorts of things.

In a slow economy like ours,

re-inhabitation is

one of the more popular strategies.

So this happens to be

a dead mall in St. Louis

that's been re-inhabited as art-space.

It's now home to artist studios,

theater groups, dance troupes.

It's not pulling in as much tax revenue

as it once was,

but it's serving its community.

It's keeping the lights on.

It's becoming, I think, a really great institution.

Other malls have been re-inhabited

as nursing homes,

as universities,

and as 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 grocery store, a 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 bioswales to collect and clean the runoff,

put in a lot more sidewalks

to connect to the neighborhoods.

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 up a restaurant 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.

The real estate ads in the neighborhood

all very proudly proclaim,

"Walking distance to Le Grande Orange,"

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,

the 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.

Now, 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,

a sort of compact, walkable urban neighborhoods.

But some of them have been much more incremental.

This is Mashpee Commons,

the oldest retrofit that we've 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 60's 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 it to connect

to new residential neighborhoods

across the arterials

and over to 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 D.C.

When Metrorail expanded transit into the suburbs

and opened a station nearby to this site,

the owners decided

to 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

and 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.

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

and 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 have just employed all-green construction.

There's massive P.V. arrays on the roofs

as well as wind turbines.

This was a very large mall

on a hundred-acre superblock.

It's now 22

walkable urban blocks

with public streets,

two public parks, eight bus lines

and a range of housing types,

and so it's really given Lakewood, Colorado

the downtown

that this particular suburb never had.

Here was the mall in 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 multistory; they're better built.

They're easy to be re-adapted.

But the one story stuff ...

that'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 helped to prompt --

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 bulldozers are coming and just plowing down the whole city.

No, it's pockets of walkability

on the sites of

under-performing 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 black-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 start to see it;

they've already built City Hall, attracted two hotels.

I could imagine beautiful housing going up along there

without tearing down another tree.

So there's a lot of great things,

but I'd love to see more corridors getting retrofitting.

But densification

is not going to work everywhere.

Sometimes re-greening

is really the better answer.

There's a lot to learn from successful

landbanking 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 re-greening 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 re-greening 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 culverted under the parking lot.

But daylighting our creeks

really improves their water quality

and contributions to habitat.

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 re-greened.

Where should we be redeveloping?

And where should we be encouraging re-inhabitation?

These slides just show two images

from a larger project

that looked at trying to do that for Atlanta.

I led a team that was asked to imagine

Atlanta 100 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 won't be viable.

And so we've created the eco-acre

transfer-to-transfer development rights

to the transit corridors

and allow the re-greening

of those former subdivisions

for food and energy production.

So 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 Spring, Maryland

on an Astroturf town green.

Now, retrofits are often accused

of being examples of faux downtowns

and instant urbanism,

and not without reason; you don't get much more phony

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 streetscapes,

but suburban parking ratios.

Their populations are

more diverse than typical suburbia,

but they're less diverse than cities.

And they are

public places,

but that are managed by private companies.

And just the surface appearance

are often -- like the Astroturf here --

they make me wince.

So, you know, I mean I'm glad that

the urbanism is doing its job.

The fact that a protest is happening

really does mean

that the layout of the blocks, the streets and blocks, the putting in of public space,

compromised as it may be,

is still a really great thing.

But 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 suburban places --

more sustainable places, period.

But culturally,

we tend to think that downtowns

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.