Old suburbia must fit into new society

Our love affair with shopping is on the skids. Ghost-town strip centers already abound. It’s not hard to imagine dead malls pocking the landscape like buffalo carcasses amid the tumbleweeds in old Westerns.

In every disaster, however, there’s an opportunity.

“Retrofitting Suburbia,” a timely book co-written by Atlantan Ellen Dunham-Jones, proposes a way to turn dead malls —- as well as ailing office parks, older subdivisions and strip-center-lined arterial roads —- into lively places. Dunham-Jones, director of Georgia Tech’s architecture program, is a proponent of New Urbanism. The movement champions walkable streets, urban blocks, public spaces, mixed-use and density as keys to enduring and sustainable communities.

She and co-author June Williamson have adapted those principles to mint what you might call New Suburbanism.

The economic downturn has undoubtedly sparked some of the buzz surrounding the book. But, as the authors argue in their book, the old suburbanism is obsolete, recession or no, and for reasons that go beyond energy consumption.

According to demographers, the housing market is heading for a sea change. At least 75 percent of new households won’t have children by 2025. The two largest population groups will be 20-somethings and baby boomers, and they won’t be looking for a big home on a cul-de-sac.

“Young professionals who want to live near suburban jobs [will be] looking for more urban housing options,” Dunham-Jones says. “Boomers, many of whom want to stay in their suburban communities, [will be] looking to downsize and have more opportunities to walk to places and socialize.”

The good news is that metro Atlanta already understands the concept. While researching her book, she discovered that Atlanta was among the top three metro areas undertaking such projects —- Smyrna Market Village and Perimeter Place in Dunwoody, among them —- or smaller adaptations.

Future retrofit projects, such as Halpern Enterprises’ Belmont Hills strip shopping center in Smyrna are awaiting a rosier economy. Last month, Taylor & Mathis got DeKalb County’s approval to turn Executive Park, a ’60s office park at North Druid Hills Road and I-85, into a mixed-use center. Dunham-Jones hopes that communities will take advantage of the construction slowdown to retool archaic zoning codes. Laws that limit the number of intersections or require low density and large setbacks, for example, are obstacles to change.

The opportunity to prepare for the future isn’t the only silver lining in our economic woes. In some parts of the country, she notes, land banks are buying foreclosed homes and turning the land into gardens or parks.

Some mall owners, faced with failing chain stores, are learning to think, shall we say, outside the box. After a theater company repurposed a grocery store in a St. Louis shopping center, the owner began leasing other spaces to artists.

Dunham-Jones acknowledges that the economy isn’t the only hurdle facing her vision of suburbia.”Change is not easy,” she says. “People like their lives.” Then again, she adds, “A crisis is sometimes what it takes to get the conversation going.”

MEET THE AUTHOR

Ellen Dunham-Jones will sign copies of “Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs” (John Wiley & Sons) 6:30 p.m. Friday at Georgia Tech Barnes & Noble Bookstore, 48 Fifth St. N.W.