Dead malls, dying office parks, aging commercial strip corridors and other parking lot-dominated properties provide communities with the opportunity sites to address new challenges from climate change to social equity that suburbia was never designed for. Drawing on her two co-authored award-winning books and unique database of over 2,500 suburban retrofits, Ellen Dunham-Jones will share successful case studies that have redeveloped, re-used, and/or regreened these sites into more just, healthy, and prosperous places.

Ellen Dunham-Jones is a professor of architecture and directs the MS in Urban Design at the Georgia Institute of Technology.  An authority on sustainable suburban redevelopment, she maintains a unique database of over 2,500 suburban retrofits, hosts the REDESIGNING CITIES podcast series, was Architectural Record’s 2018-19 Woman Educator of the year, was recognized in 2023 and 2017 by Planetizen as one of the 100 most influential urbanists, was the 2023 Plym Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Illinois asking “what would a non-sexist suburb be like?”, and will be awarded The Seaside Prize in February 2025 along with her co-author June Williamson.

She is co-author with June of two award-winning books: Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs, (Wiley, 2009, 2011, Mandarin 2013) received a PROSE award as best architecture and planning book of 2009. The sequel, Case Studies in Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Strategies for Urgent Challenges (Wiley, 2021) received the Book of the year award from the Environmental Design Research Association. This book series documents how successful retrofits of aging shopping centers, strip mall corridors, office parks, and other parking-lot dominated properties are helping their communities disrupt automobile dependence, improve public health, support an aging population, leverage social capital for equity, compete for jobs, and add water and energy resilience. The work has been featured in The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, PBS, NPR, TED and other prominent venues.

She is a Fellow of the Congress for the New Urbanism as well as the Brook Byers Institute of Sustainable Systems, serves on the Urban Deisgn Academic Council steering committee, lectures widely, and conducts workshops and research on the many co-benefits of retrofitting – as well as on the potential urban design impacts of autonomous vehicles. She has BS and M.Arch degrees from Princeton University, practiced architecture for 20 years, and taught at UVA and MIT before being recruited to direct the Architecture Program at Georgia Tech in 2000.

The Douglas S. Kelbaugh Lecture is generously funded through an endowed fund given by Douglas Kelbaugh and Kathleen Nolan to support an annual public lecture on the topic of urban design. The contributions of Douglas Kelbaugh, FAIA, FCNU, professor emeritus of architecture and urban and regional planning and dean emeritus of Taubman College, to the field of sustainable architecture and urban planning, the Taubman College community, cities, and the education of students will continue to create a positive impact in the world for years to come, including through the annual Kelbaugh Lecture.