Is a Sustainable Suburbia Still Possible Post-Pandemic?

"Collectively, we've often thought of the suburbs as though they're frozen in amber, but they've been showing their age for quite some time now," muses Ellen Dunham-Jones, Director of the Urban Design program at Georgia Tech and co-author of Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbia. Dunham-Jones grew up in New Jersey – "the most suburban state in the nation," she says – and has spent her academic career studying how to optimize suburban development.

Dead malls and empty office parks don’t bother Dunham-Jones, as they’re not just monuments to faded infrastructure, but grounds for possibility. Ten years ago, we thought the same, and challenged architects and designers to dream up greener visions of suburbia in our January 2010 issue, which exclusively covered the future of design. "With the current housing crisis, the sub-prime mortgage meltdown, and rising energy costs, the future of suburbia looks bleak," we wrote. 

Dwell and Inhabitat joined with Reburbia, an architect-founded blog, to launch a competition for the best design solutions to address the problems of suburban development. Out of the hundreds of proposals submitted, three entries were selected by a panel of judges, and one chosen by readers' votes.

"Forward Thinking or Far-fetched?" asked an Architect magazine headline when the contest results were announced. Turns out, the answer to that question might be: Both. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. 

Let's revisit. 

Reader’s Choice: Sprawl Repair Toolkit

For the Sprawl Repair Toolkit, Galina Tahchieva suggested techniques to retrofit five typical suburban building types, including a strip mall, gas station, and McMansion. Such retrofits better utilize empty and underperforming land that surrounds the buildings, densifies neighborhoods, employs green technology, and fosters a more "walkable urban fabric" to combat the baked-in car dependence of the suburbs. 

In 2010, Tahchieva expanded on the Toolkit in her book, the Sprawl Repair Manual, which serves as a comprehensive how-to guide for combating sprawl at all different scales. Today, Tahchieva is a Managing Partner at the Miami office of DPZ CoDesign, a leading firm in the New Urbanism movement, which seeks to "promote mixed-use, traditional neighborhood planning over the segregated-use suburban sprawl seen worldwide." 

At DPZ, Tahchieva works on master plans for places like Phoenix, a "poster child for sprawl," but which, in the past decade, has taken a "forward-thinking" approach to reverse it by investing in walkable development along a new light rail line. "I'm in the trenches," says Tahchieva, adding that she thinks: "What has been achieved in the last decade has been more ambitious than what was shown" in our competition just ten years ago.