June Williamson is Associate Professor in the Spitzer School of Architecture at The City College of New York. She is co-author, with Ellen Dunham-Jones, of Retrofitting Suburbia (9780470934326). She lives in New York.
"...rich integration of text and figures, Designing Suburban
Futures is an eye-candy feast, with color images everywhere the
reader looks."
-- "Urbanland"
"Designing Suburban Futures ... is a concise, pithy, and lucid
analysis of how the suburbs came to be and the efforts underway to
reform them."
-- "Better! Cities & Towns"
"refreshingly realistic about the political landscape."
-- "Planning"
"In the next decades, cities worldwide will have to adapt to
rapidly changing environmental and social conditions and
low-density suburbs will need to radically transform. Through a
unique analysis intertwined with history, Designing Suburban
Futures shows us how this can be done. It is an important read for
anyone who is serious about understanding and changing current
development practice."
--Eran Ben-Joseph "Head of the Department of Urban Studies +
Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology"
"Suburbia may be paved with good intentions, but its manifold costs
are now as well known as its endless cul-de-sacs and malls. This
well-crafted book shows how sprawl's seemingly indelible imprint on
America can be embroidered and re-jiggered into more resilient,
livable places."
--Doug Kelbaugh "Professor of Architecture and Urban Planning,
University of Michigan"
"This is a very graphic book throughout, with a multitude of wide
ranging photos, plans, diagrams, montages, renderings and 3D design
proposals."
-- "Urban Design"
"Williamson uses the brevity to her advantage to make the evolution
of the suburbs understandable through a clear and concise
structure... The book is a slim but important addition to the
literature on the American suburb, an important canvas this
century."
-- "A Daily Dose of Architecture"
"...worth a read, especially for those who want to get a good
introduction to the issues around suburban development."
-- "Spacing"
"Excellent color illustrations show how to design better suburbs,
without trying to make them into Manhattan. A great design
resource!"
-- "Urban Review STL"
"Designing Suburban Futures is an excellent resource for students
in a variety of disciplines...a useful educational resource for
planners, architects, landscape architects, developers and
politicians...By presenting a variety of strategies which emphasize
different components of the retrofit process (environmental,
economical, social, ecological) this book offers different
perspectives and will hopefully open discussion lines for differing
parties to find common approaches."
-- "Alternatives Journal"
"It's easy to lament the state of suburbia (and many do). What's
extremely hard is to develop creative solutions for transformation
(which almost no one does well). But that's precisely what June
Williamson has done with this terrific book. With this guide, a
seemingly insurmountable challenge now feels like an
opportunity."
--Allison Arieff "contributing columnist, The New York Times"
"What used to be called the crisis of the city has moved to the
suburbs. In response, June Williamson's call to action is both
prescient and grounded in expert knowledge. Designing Suburban
Futures cuts into stereotypes with a scalpel, and makes its urgent
case for the fresh interaction of design, policy, and practice with
equal parts elegance, erudition, and respect."
--Reinhold Martin "Associate Professor of Architecture, Columbia
University"
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