Back in 2009, Ellen Dunham-Jones and June Williamson’s Retrofitting Suburbia took the sprawling American suburb as its object and sought not to replace it but to revitalise it by raising the density and diversity of uses and experiences. Suburban sprawl had, of course, long been a source of unease for urban planners, transport economists and environmentalists preoccupied by the land-hungry, distance-maximising (sub)urban form created by the auto-dependent expansion of towns and cities enabled by zoning and roadbuilding. In this respect, Retrofitting Suburbia offered a necessary corrective for well-known and much-deliberated concerns.
Yet the book’s publication in 2009 was also prescient because it shone a spotlight on the suburbs just as their lustre began to fade in the wake of the US subprime mortgage crisis that left a trail of bad debt and foreclosures and led many to question the future of the suburbs. ‘Are the suburbs where the American Dream goes to die?’[i] asked the Atlantic in 2013, while in 2012, The New York Times pointed to the costs of supplying welfare to far-flung low density areas, noting that ‘the suburbs were not designed for the poor’[ii]. Meanwhile, in academic debate the new urban economics had made first contact with the policy mainstream, with Ed Glaeser’s Triumph of the City[iii] and Enrico Moretti’s The New Geography of Jobs[iv] being channelled into an urban agenda that prioritised density and centrality over the quarter acre suburban plot and the driveway.
Retrofitting Suburbia addressed negative outcomes of suburbia – some inherent, like auto-dependency, others emerging, like declining shopping centres – as problematics to be resolved by incremental urban change. A mismatch between large single-family houses on substantial plots and decreasing average household size might be corrected for by the sensitive development of additional smaller housing on existing plots. Elsewhere, the monotony and under-use of strip malls – retail parks set back from the street with large amount of surface parking – can be challenged by turning a car park into a street-facing courtyard with restaurants and outdoor seating.
A visit to Atlanta in February 2026 to present this project’s Urban Retrofit concept and evidence review at the Planning Law and Property Rights conference at Georgia Tech[v] gave Professor James White and I the chance to see how the suburbs in one of the lowest-density cities in the US are changing to meet present demands. Travelling to Atlanta meant that we got the opportunity to meet up with Ellen Dunham-Jones, the co-author of Retrofitting Suburbia, Professor of Architecture at Georgia Tech, and a member of Urban Retrofit’s project advisory group. We also had the pleasure of meeting Yilun Zha, PhD candidate in architecture also at Georgia Tech. Ellen and Yilun were kind enough to devote a day of their weekend to take us on a tour of urban retrofitting sights in the biggest city in the American South.
There is arguably no better place to see both the scale of the challenge of retrofitting suburbia and the nature of the response than Atlanta. As a metropolitan region of 6.4m people spread over 22,000km2, Atlanta was rated as the most sprawling large metropolitan area in the US in the most recent Measuring Sprawl report by Smart Growth America[vi]. More recently, a tailing off of the city’s once seemingly endless growth has led Paul Krugman to suggest that Atlanta may have met the ‘limits of sprawl’ as continued expansion through additional housing at the periphery now results in untenable travel times by car – often the only available mode of transport[vii].
Our tour – necessarily by car – took us beyond the sharp spike in density in the downtown and midtown areas into Atlanta’s low-rise sprawl, which begins abruptly at the edge of the core. This gave us an immediate insight into how the city has adjusted use mix and density as a means of achieving liveability and sustainability. Larger redevelopment projects might correspond to what can be found in a European context, such as Atlantic Station’s replacement of a central industrial site with a mid-rise, mixed-use development accessible by public transport. Elsewhere more characteristically North American challenges associated with a decline in demand for strip malls and indoor malls, alongside a slow realisation of the benefits of replacing an autocentric environment with a pedestrian-centred streetscape, have prompted inventive responses. A stretch of Peachtree Boulevard in the upscale Buckhead neighbourhood is presently a congested six lane artery lined with strip malls and offices surrounded by parking, but plans now being put in place add street-level interest and public spaces that recognise the potential of adding visual interest and opportunities for vitality[viii]. Further north, in Sandy Springs, the need for a new city hall following the incorporation of the area as an administrative city prompted the creation of a new town centre at a suburban location on the site of a tired strip mall[ix]. An arts centre and town green were established on land that had mostly been taken up by surface parking, with associated mid-rise residential and retail developments constructed to take advantage of this new point of centrality.
Atlanta’s lack of physical constraints – it has no mountain or body of water to contain its spread – combined with the absence of growth controls and a zoning system that has historically favoured low density suburban development has resulted in a metropolitan area comprised largely of single-family suburban housing on substantial plots of land. With population growth now slowing, average household size decreasing, and traffic congestion a major concern, suburban densification projects propose ways of refitting the traditional suburban neighbourhood to better match present demands. Sensitive redevelopment of sites like the one at the corner of Flat Shoals Avenue SE and Wilbur Avenue SE, in the Reynoldstown district, mix small retail units with flats to enclose a green inner courtyard and parking area to raise densities and mix uses without altering the local suburban feel. Further east in Edgewood the Finley Street development creatively uses existing zoning rules to insert twelve additional dwellings on neighbouring plots occupied by two detached houses while preserving those original homes[x]. The project successfully raises density 17-fold with little alteration to the street-facing building facades by avoiding off-street parking provision but nevertheless managing to create a common green area and sense of place.
Most emblematic of Atlanta’s aspiration to reorientate itself away from an urban environment dominated by suburban housing, strip malls, and highways, is the Belt Line, a 22-mile loop of pedestrian and cycle paths that rings the inner city. Not only does the Belt Line provide an active travel alternative to the roads that dominate elsewhere, but its green space provision has created scope for living, working and socialising in urban patterns unfamiliar to a city characterised by separation of uses. The Ponce City Market redevelopment, which has adapted a substantial brick factory building into a mixed-use landmark adjacent to the Belt Line, has propagated a concentration of flats, restaurants and offices located between the Belt Line and a stormwater urban drainage pond at which office rents match those offered in the Downtown area[xi].
While Atlanta’s juxtaposing suburban spawl and sustainable reinvention is particular to the city, its focus on the sensitive densification and the provision of housing more appropriate to its present needs is a necessary correction common to cities in the UK and elsewhere in Europe. Likewise, though densification solutions achieved through ‘by right’ zoning might not be easily replicated elsewhere, commonalities of approach and intent are evident. Indeed, as politicians and policymakers struggle to marry up sustainability goals with housebuilding targets, as concerns around slow growth and housing crises become louder in the US[xii] and the UK[xiii], Atlanta’s incremental adaptation represents an attempt to identify synergies in place of trade-offs.
All photos taken by Prof James White
[i] O’Brien, M. (2013) Are the suburbs where the American dream goes to die? The Atlantic, available at: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/07/are-the-suburbs-where-the-american-dream-goes-to-die/278014/.
[ii] New York Times (2012) Editorial: Struggling in the suburbs, New York Times, available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/opinion/sunday/struggling-in-the-suburbs.html.
[iii] Glaeser, E.L. (2011) Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier. London: Macmillan.
[iv] Moretti, E. (2013) The New Geography of Jobs. Boston, Mass.: Mariner Books.
[v] Planning Law and Property Rights Conference 2026, International Academic Association on Planning Law and Property Rights and Georgia Tech College of Design, available at: https://design.gatech.edu/PLPRAtlanta.
[vi] Smart Growth America (2014) Measuring Sprawl 2014. Smart Growth America: Making Neighbourhoods Great Together, available at: https://wordpress.smartgrowthamerica.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/measuring-sprawl-2014.pdf.
[vii] Krugman, P. (2025) Is Atlanta’s slowdown telling us something? Available at: https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-limits-of-sprawl.
[viii] Urbanize Atlanta (2024) Potential ‘refresh’ of Atlanta’s most famous street gains steam. Urbanize Atlanta, available at: https://atlanta.urbanize.city/post/midtown-peachtree-street-refresh-atl-most-famous-redo.
[ix] Sandy Springs (2026) City Springs development, available at: https://www.sandyspringsga.gov/city-springs-development.
[x] Steuteville (2023) Car-optional community is model for attainable housing. Congress for New Urbanism, https://www.cnu.org/publicsquare/2023/10/18/car-lite-community-missing-middle-housing-pilot.
[xi] CoStar (2026) Atlanta property market data. Available at: https://costar.com.
[xii] Dougherty (2025) Why America should sprawl: The word has become an epithet for garish, reckless growth – but to fix the housing crisis, the country needs more of it. New York Times Magazine, available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/10/magazine/suburban-sprawl-texas.html.
[xiii] Financial Times (2024) Britain’s gummed-up planning system: Red tape must be slashed to meet the UK’s demand for housing and infrastructure. The Editorial Board, The Financial Times, available at: https://www.ft.com/content/64115b38-838e-4729-9c02-a4dd98dba10d.
