• Trails, greens, and housing trending for retrofit

    Williamson and Dunham-Jones explain what's hot in reforming suburbs on CNU’s On the Park Bench.
    The suburban built environment has symbolized America since the 1950s, and it desperately needs an upgrade. Many malls, commercial strips, and office parks are struggling or dying, unable to compete with the Internet and hurt by remote work. Architectural professors June Williamson and Ellen Dunham...Read more

  • Old walls, new homes

    Adaptive reuse as a solution for housing
    Across the United States, cities are grappling with housing shortages and the challenge of revitalizing underutilized spaces. Vacant malls, abandoned factories, shuttered schools, and empty churches often sit idle, wasting valuable potential. But these structures don’t have to remain relics of the...Read more

  • Putting historic stables to new use

    The Chapman Stables housing in DC shows how sites can evolve radically, while the street-facing facade remains.
    Urban buildings and blocks transform radically over time. The Chapman Stables site on N Street NW in DC was a coal yard, stables, a garage and repair shop for Model Ts in the 1920s, a corrugated box factory, and a warehouse. The Truxton Circle neighborhood was a rough-and-tumble part of the City in...Read more

  • Model for suburban retrofit in the Inland Empire

    Rancho Cucamonga is implementing urbanism on arterial roads and suburban commercial areas. This plan is intended to lead the way to density and mixed-use in a suburban city in Southern California.
    Some experts predict the major development trend in the next 20 years will be “urbanizing the suburbs,” bringing density and mixed-use to underutilized commercial areas. If so, the Inland Empire of Southern California, with 4.6 million people, could be a test case. Rancho Cucamonga, an important...Read more