Ellen Dunham-Jones will present a lecture on “Retrofitting Suburbs for 21st-Century Challenges” at the LSU Coastal Sustainability Studio at 11:30 a.m. on Wednesday, October 14, 2015. She will also meet with students interested in an urban design master’s degree at Georgia Tech.

How are designers retrofitting dead malls, vacant big box stores, dying commercial strip corridors and aging office parks into more sustainable places? These underperforming suburban property types are providing surprising opportunities to address the challenges of water & energy efficiency, public health, affordability, social capital and other challenges that the suburbs were never designed to deal with but that are accelerating given today’s rapidly changing generational preferences. Drawing on her database of over 1200 case studies across the country, Ellen Dunham-Jones will provide both an overview of trends in suburban redevelopment as well as presentations of projects that are raising the bar.

Ellen Dunham-Jones, FCNU, is an architect and professor at Georgia Institute of Technology, where she coordinates the MS in Urban Design. An authority on suburban development, she is coauthor with June Williamson of Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs (Wiley, 2009, 2011, 2013). The book has been featured in The New York Times, and on TED, PBS, and NPR, and has contributed significantly to the debate about how to transform our suburbs. Professor Dunham-Jones’ research intersects trends in contemporary urban theory, health, and real-estate development.