Lecture Recap and Video: June Williamson on 'A Retrofitting Suburbia Agenda for Equity, Health and Resilience to Climate Change'

Oct. 31, 2022
Image

Drawing from her newest book, Case Studies in Retrofitting Suburbia (Wiley, 2021), Visiting Professor of Architecture June Williamson discusses urgent challenges produced by northern American suburban form. She shares case studies showcasing urban design strategies to mitigate and address these challenges via the retrofitting of aging and obsolete suburban office parks, shopping malls and strip centers, gas stations and big box stores.


Watch the Lecture


Image
June Williamson

About June Williamson

Visiting Professor June Williamson RA, ASSOC. AIA, LEED AP is a registered architect and professor of architecture at the Spitzer School of Architecture at The City College of New York/CUNY, where she has been on the full-time faculty since 2008 and recently completed a term as department chair. She is an international expert on the suburban retrofitting, a.k.a. the uses of good urban design in the redevelopment, reinhabitation and regreening of obsolete suburban built form. She is coauthor with Ellen Dunham-Jones of the 2021 Great Places Book Award-winning Case Studies in Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Strategies for Urgent Challenges (Wiley), a long-awaited sequel to the first book in the series, Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs. She also wrote Designing Suburban Futures: New Models from Build a Better Burb (Island Press), contextualizing and documenting an urban design ideas competition for Long Island, New York, that led to the Build a Better Burb website.

  

Subscribe to The Studio

Sign up for CAPLA's monthly e-newsletter to get the latest news and events, insights from faculty and leadership, profiles of students and alumni and more.

Subscribe Now

Latest CAPLA News, Projects and Profiles

Image
Building rendering.

CAPLA students reimagine accessible architecture through Universal Design

Bachelor of Architecture students were recognized in the 2024 AGM Universal Design Student Awards for innovative projects that centered empathy, accessibility, and the human experience. Winning designs by Taranm Akbary and Sadey Bowles reimagined inclusive spaces in Bisbee, showcasing how Universal Design can elevate both creativity and community impact.

Image
Montse Bover

MS.Arch Grad’s Research Award Signals Bright Future

As Montse Estrany Bover graduates with a Master of Science in Architecture from CAPLA, she leaves with a prestigious research award for her thesis on Catalunya’s historic agricultural landscapes. Now working at an architecture firm in Spain, she plans to pursue a Ph.D. to continue blending research and practice.