Future Anterior: Journal of Historic Preservation History, Theory, and Criticism

June Williamson and Ellen Dunham-Jones have been advocates for reimagining suburbia at least since the 2009 publication of their first co-authored book, Retrofitting Suburbia. That book quickly became a standard in the field of urban design because it so clearly addressed a glaring need. It documented how existing suburban form could be made more urban, more sustainable, and more vital. Retrofitting Suburbia enjoyed a revision in 2011, and the book presently under review, Case Studies in Retrofitting Suburbia, represents a logical continuation of those earlier works. As Williamson and Dunham-Jones indicate in their introduction, it is meant to be a sequel, not a revision. At this point, the case no longer needs to be exhaustively made that the suburban landscape presents challenges that can be addressed through more thoughtful urban design. But things do change, even in suburbia. This book is a successful effort to respond to those changes, and it puts a finer point on the issues facing suburbia today.

The first of the book's two chapters is devoted to identifying the most significant design challenges that the authors see as facing suburbia. The second chapter includes thirty-two case studies that approach at least one of the challenges introduced in the first chapter, though most of the case studies address two or more. The case studies are typically five to six pages in length, and are richly illustrated with color photographs, renderings, and maps. The ample footnotes include sources and supplementary information that students and other researchers will appreciate.

The six challenges presented by the authors help to situate the book within various planning and design discourses, while also serving as an organizational device. The challenges featured are: disrupt automobile dependence; improve public health; support an aging population; leverage social capital for equity; compete for jobs; and add water and energy resilience. While the challenges themselves are not necessarily new, in many ways they manifest themselves differently in the suburbia of 2021 than they did in the suburbia of the late twentieth century, or even suburbia at the time of their first publication in 2009. Disrupting automobile dependence has long been a goal of New Urbanists and public health advocates, for example, but no one writing in 2009 was thinking about the consequences of [End Page 154] ride-sharing apps, and driverless cars were even more experimental than they are today. Other forces that have influenced the changes required of suburbia since this series first began include the rising purchasing power and changing lifestyle preferences of the Millennial workforce, the consequences of the Great Recession (though the first waves of that event did shape the 2011 revision), greater awareness of the relationship between racial inequality and the built environment, and the increasingly obvious pressures of climate change.

The case studies that the authors use to explore how suburbia can be retrofitted in response to these challenges are geographically diverse, with Georgia, California, Texas, and the DC Metro area receiving similar levels of attention. The Upper Midwest, Southern New England, seven other states, and the Province of Quebec are also represented.

The case studies range in scale from less than an acre in East Greenwich, Rhode Island, to a four-mile stretch of the Rockville Pike in Montgomery County, Maryland. Without getting into the specifics of the case studies, for which one should certainly buy a copy of the book, they highlight the redevelopments, re-inhabitations, and re-greenings (the authors' terms) of a variety of existing suburban forms.

From an instructional perspective, the book will be very useful. The case studies are current, the indexing system used makes it a simple process to see why the given case studies are being highlighted, as well as to find other, related cases. Students will have no trouble determining which of the book's case studies align with their interests.

From a preservationist's perspective, the idea of thirty-two case...