{"id":2493,"date":"2013-02-07T13:05:50","date_gmt":"2013-02-07T20:05:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/?p=2493"},"modified":"2013-06-26T12:24:37","modified_gmt":"2013-06-26T18:24:37","slug":"retrofitting-dead-and-dying-suburban-places","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/?p=2493","title":{"rendered":"Retrofitting Dead and Dying Suburban Places"},"content":{"rendered":"

The College of Architecture and Planning at the University of Colorado at Denver<\/a> is hosting a spring lecture series<\/a> on \u201cDesign in the Public Interest & Alternative Forms of Practice.\u201d\u00a0 Last week Ellen Dunham-Jones kicked things off with a lecture on \u201cRetrofitting Suburbia.\u201c She essentially reprised and updated the arguments presented in her book with June Williamson that\u2019s now in a revised edition<\/a>.\u00a0 This included a comprehensive smart growth<\/a> rationale for retrofitting suburban spaces and numerous examples illustrating three distinctive retrofitting strategies that Dunham-Jones referred to as re-inhabitation, re-development, and re-greening.<\/p>\n

\"Lecture<\/a><\/p>\n

Dunham-Jones\u2019s rationale for smart growth retrofitting of suburbia is commonsensical and compelling.\u00a0\u00a0 Suburbia contains lots of vacant and underperforming spaces\u2014to the tune of over 1 billion square feet. Climate change requires that we decrease the carbon footprint of these areas by investing in walkability. Incentivizing walkability will also help address America\u2019s serious health problems around obesity. The 40% greater cost of municipal services in sprawling suburbs compared to urban cores, combined with economic recession and growing suburban poverty, recommends retrofitting for greater density and mixed use. There\u2019s also an emerging cultural shift that\u2019s best met by retrofitting for density and walkability: 77% of Millennials and 75% of Aging Baby Boomers<\/a> want a more \u201curban core\u201d lifestyle that has desired amenities within walking distance.\u00a0 All of this (among other things) makes traditional first ring suburbs<\/a>, given that they are now more central than ever before, especially prime spots for smart growth and transit-oriented retrofitting.<\/p>\n

\"RetroFitSubUpdated.640\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Examples of promising suburban retrofits now number in the six hundreds, up from the 80 or so examples that Dunham-Jones and Williamson drew from in the first edition of their book.\u00a0 Re-inhabitation is exemplified by the widely-heralded conversion of an abandoned Walmart store into a public library in McAllen, Texas<\/a>. Re-development of a \u201czombie subdivision\u201d into a residential project including Habitat for Humanity townhomes serving low income people distinguishes Walkers Bend<\/a> in Covington, Georgia. Re-greening takes a nice turn at \u00a0Columbus (Ohio) City Center Park.<\/a>\u00a0 Dunham-Jones also reaffirmed her favorable opinion of Belmar<\/a>, a Denver area mall retrofit that serves as an extended case study in her book and that we previously discussed here<\/a>. For Dunham-Jones Belmar has good construction, great connectivity, and sufficient variation in building styles to create a successful \u201csense of place.\u201d In fact, Dunham-Jones applauded Denver for being a leader in regional mall retrofitting\u2014we\u2019ve \u201cfigured it out\u201d\u2014given that 8 of 13 regional malls have already been retrofitted and more are being retrofitted as we speak.<\/p>\n

\"CCE.77.640\"<\/a>

CityCenter Englewood (D. Saitta)<\/p><\/div>\n

Denver\u2019s several examples of suburban mall retrofitting offer an opportunity for evaluating how these places resonate with Millennial generation tastes. \u00a0I asked students in my Fall 2012 Culture and The City<\/a> course to evaluate three Denver suburban retrofits–Belmar,\u00a0CityCenter Englewood<\/a>, and the Streets at SouthGlenn<\/a>–and\u00a0pick the one they would live in if given choice.\u00a0 Only 20% chose Belmar, suggesting that they don\u2019t share Dunham-Jones\u2019s enthusiasm for this particular retrofit.\u00a0 Twenty percent chose the Streets at Southglenn.\u00a0 Interestingly, 60% went for CityCenter Englewood.\u00a0 Among the reasons: the development\u2019s investment in outdoor sculpture, public library and art museum, and greater residential affordability.\u00a0 Students also appreciated CityCenter Englewood\u2019s Light Rail transit connectivity (Belmar\u2019s eight connecting bus lines did very little for them).\u00a0 In this respect my students disagreed with Alan Ehrenhalt\u2019s assessment in his book The Great Inversion<\/i><\/a> (the \u201cUrbanizing the Suburbs\u201d chapter, page 215), that CityCenter Englewood \u201cturns its back on the light rail station and on transit oriented development in general.\u201d\u00a0 Students appreciated the greater opportunity for encountering ethnic diversity at CityCenter Englewood, which some students explicitly linked to the nearby presence of value shopping retail outlets like Walmart. Walmart is apparently not an issue for these students as it is for citizens of their parent\u2019s age living elsewhere in the city<\/a>. \u00a0In short, CityCenter Englewood struck my students as a more \u201cauthentic\u201d urban place than the relatively more artificial developments of Belmar and Streets at SouthGlenn. \u00a0Their experience in, and evaluation of these places was very different from that of the professional opinion-shapers.<\/p>\n

\"Mother<\/a>

Mother with Child and Outdoor Sculpture, CityCenter Englewood (courtesy Mengye Liu)<\/p><\/div>\n

Dunham-Jones ended her talk by noting several challenges facing the contemporary city. \u00a0Cities must dis-incentivize sprawl.\u00a0 They have to do \u201cinstant urbanism\u201d much better as concerns the visual interest and quality of design.\u00a0 Perhaps the biggest thing to \u201cfigure out\u201d is how to make retrofits affordable and thereby prevent the displacement of poorer populations. \u00a0Several of the cases Dunham-Jones presented looked very good in theory but in practice they only produced more gentrification.\u00a0 I would add that it might also be wise for suburban and urban retrofitters to do better testing of design concepts with the target populations that they intend to serve.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The College of Architecture and Planning at the University of Colorado at Denver is hosting a spring lecture series on \u201cDesign in the Public Interest & Alternative Forms of Practice.\u201d\u00a0 Last week Ellen Dunham-Jones kicked things off with a lecture […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[5,18,16,20,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2493","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-intercultural-city","category-new-urbanism","category-placemaking","category-sustainability"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1H2bI-Ed","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2493","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2493"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2493\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2848,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2493\/revisions\/2848"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2493"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2493"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2493"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}