Ellen Dunham-Jones

As suburbs and small towns age, they are facing challenges they were never designed for. These include a shrinking middle class, an aging population, an affordable housing crisis, flooding and wildfires brought on by climate change, increased traffic and reduced access to nature, rising poverty levels alongside underperforming infrastructure and decreased tax revenue due to the increasing number of dead malls, dying office parks, and near vacant strip malls. Yet, it is exactly these type of obsolescent parking-lot dominated properties that provide communities with the opportunities to address their challenges.

Drawing on the speaker's database of over 2,500 suburban retrofits, a viral TED talk, and two award-winning books, the speaker will illustrate the three main retrofit strategies: redevelopment into walkable, mixed-use communities, reinhabitation with more community-serving uses, and regreening to create new amenities and repair the local ecology. She will customize the talk with 15-25 successful case studies that are particularly applicable to the challenges that the audience is wrestling with and show them how to layer multiple solutions through effective design. Attendees will come away inspired, optimistic, and ready to both imagine and implement change.