Retrofitting Suburbia for Equity and Resilience to Climate Change
2022-CxD02
Included in subscription
1.00
LU|HSW
4.59
Course expires on: 09/19/2025
Included in subscription
Description
With all the talk about the importance of cities in the global climate fight, suburban jurisdictions have received relatively less attention. However, in the US suburban residents are responsible for half of our household carbon footprint due to inefficient land use and the resulting transportation and resource use patterns they produce. This session will explore strategies for shifting drivable suburbs to more walkable urban communities and explain how this change supports goals and policies related to resilience, active transportation, and community building. In addition, the speakers will discuss gentrification pressures and the implications strategies have on communities, with the goal of breaking cycles of disinvestment and preventing displacement. Join this important conversation with thought leaders who are driving the movement and working on the front lines of suburban change today.
Hosted by AIA Center for Communities by Design.
Course expires 09/18/2025
Learning Objectives
Explain key challenges suburbs face in the climate transition
Explore key principles and priorities to consider and understand a variety of retrofit opportunities and challenges
Apply practical lessons learned from experience implementing suburban retrofit projects and their application to similar suburban contexts elsewhere
Identify tools to improve equitable outcomes and a community’s social cohesion
This session was recorded live on August 16, 2022.
JoAnne Fiebe is a Revitalization Program Manager and urban designer based in Fairfax County, VA. Her work centers on retrofitting post World War II suburbs into sustainable, walkable, and culturally relevant urban environments. Her professional background is diverse. She has experience working as a developer of residential and mixed-use neighborhoods, as a researcher at the Center for Urban Transportation Research in Tampa, FL, and in local government. JoAnne is a founding member of the Urban Charrette, a non-profit that helps cities solve urban design problems. She once owned a food truck and a solar power installation company.
JoAnne holds a B.Arch from the University of Miami and a Masters of Urban and Community Design from the University of South Florida where she is adjunct faculty and teaches on the history of city design
June Williamson, RA, Assoc. AIA, LEED AP, is a Professor at the City College of New York’s Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture. 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), documenting the 2010 urban design ideas competition for Long Island that led to the Build a Better Burb website. A frequent speaker and consultant, her writing is also published in the books Retrofitting Sprawl, Social Justice in Diverse Suburbs, and Independent for Life: Homes and Neighborhoods for an Aging America, as well as numerous other publications. She recently served on the Board of Directors of both AIA New York and the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture. She has degrees in architecture and urban design from Yale College, MIT, and CCNY.