Retrofitting suburbia | Ellen Dunham-Jones | TEDxAtlanta

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.

So, retrofitting suburbia

is the idea that I want to try
and share with you today.

We've had - the last fifty 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 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 fifty 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 underperforming,

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 going to 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 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 retrofitting,
in urbanizing the suburbs.

Similarly, all that driving
that we've been doing out in the suburbs -

we have doubled
the amount of miles we drive

and so 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 obesity has also been triggering

great increases in heart disease
and diabetes

to the point where today,
a child born today

has a 1-in-3 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,
the affordability question.

How affordable is it to continue to live
in suburbia with rising gas prices?

Suburban expansion to cheap land
for the last 50 years -

the cheap land out on the edge
has helped generations of families

enjoy the American Dream.

But increasingly, the savings promised
by drive-til-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%
of their income on housing

and 32% on transportation.

And that's 2005 figures,
that's before we got up

to the 4 bucks a gallon.

None of us really tend to do the math
on our transportation costs

and they're not going down anytime soon.

So I've tried to make the case
that it's important to do this

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 found over 80 varied projects

but they are 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 to do
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
really started hitting child-rearing age.

They're the other big generation.

So as a result of that,
demographers predict that through 2025

75-85% of new households
will not have kids in them.

And then the market research,
consumer research

of asking the Boomers
and Gen Y what it is they like

what they would like to live in,

tells us that there is going to be
a huge demand

and we are 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 under-performing asphalt.

Now, I keep thinking this would be
a great name for an indie rock band

(Laughter)

but developers generally use it
to refer to 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 those sites.

So, what do you do with a dead mall,
a 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.

This happens to be
a dead mall in St. Louis

that's been re-inhabited as art space.

It's now home to artists' studios,
theater groups

dance troupes, and a variety of things.

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 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 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 run-off

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.

And this one is a little L-shaped
strip shopping center in Phoenix, Arizona.

Really what they did was
they gave it a fresh coat of bright paint,

a gourmet grocery,

and they put 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 taken over the strip
across the street

the real-estate ads in the neighborhood
all very proudly proclaim,

"Walking distance to La 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: re-development.

During the boom, there were several
really dramatic re-development projects

where the original building
was scraped to the ground

and then the whole site was rebuilt
at significantly greater density

as sort of compact,
walkable urban neighborhoods.

But some of them
have been much more incremental.

This is Mashpea 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 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 residential neighborhoods

across the arterials
and over on the other side.

So sometimes it's incremental,
sometimes it's all at once.

This is another in-fill 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.

So 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 it 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 100-acre superblock

it's now 22 walkable urban blocks

with public streets, two public parks

8 bus lines, and a range of housing types.

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. (Laughter)

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 built,

they're easy to be readapted.

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 1500 households
with the option of a more urban lifestyle.

It's about two-thirds built out right now.

So here's what the new main street
looks like - very successful.

And it's helped to prompt eight
of the thirteen regional malls in Denver

have now, or have announced plans
to be retrofitted.

Once the private sector
and the private sector

both sort of figure out what to do

it really has a trigger effect.

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 underpreforming 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 in the black-and-white images below

and they built a boulevard

that has become
the main street for their town

and it transformed from being
an ugly, unsafe, undesirable address

to becoming a beautiful, attractive,
dignified, good address.

Now we're hoping we'll start to see -

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.

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 land-banking programs.

Cities like Flint, Michigan

and there's also a burgeoning
suburban farming movement

sort of a victory gardens
meets the Internet.

All sorts of possibilities.

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 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.

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 re-developing,

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 100 years: transit on all major
rail and road corridors.

Two, in 100 years: thousand-foot buffers
on all stream corridors.

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 sub-divisions

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 Springs, 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 the surface appearances are often

like the AstroTurf here,
you know, they make me wince.

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

is still a really great thing.

But we've just 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.

Culturally, we tend to think
that downtowns should be dynamic,

and we expect that but we seem
o 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.
(Applause)