Ellen Dunham-Jones is a professor of architecture and director of the MS in Urban Design at the Georgia Institute of Technology, in Atlanta, Georgia. An authority on sustainable suburban development, Dunham-Jones maintains a unique database of more than 2,500 suburban retrofits, hosts the Redesigning Cities podcast series, was Architectural Record’s 2018 Woman Educator of the Year, was recognized in 2023 and 2017 by Planetizen as one of the 100 most influential urbanists, and is a recipient of the 2025 Seaside Prize along with June Williamson.  

Dunham-Jones will present a lecture at 4:30 p.m. Monday, September 23, in Ken and Linda Sue Shollmier Hall, Room 250 of Vol Walker Hall, on the University of Arkansas campus, as part of the fall lecture series in the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design.  

In her lecture, “Retrofitting Suburbia,” Dunham-Jones will discuss how American suburbia was never as homogenous as the 1950s stereotype of white picket fences and white families. She’ll explain how, while aspects of that stereotype continue to sprawl out into farm fields, what is left behind is not what it used to be. The landscape where most Americans live is aging — as are its residents.  

The middle class is shrinking, and more Americans in poverty have lived in suburbs than in cities since 2005. Yet, the once-good schools and infrastructure they now have access to no longer receive tax revenue from boarded-up strip malls, half-empty office parks, 500 dead shopping malls and hundreds of condemned garden apartment complexes. But Dunham-Jones says it is precisely these obsolescent properties that are now being redeveloped, reinhabited or regreened to help their communities address the challenges for which they were never designed.  

Drawing on her database of more than 2,500 suburban retrofits and two award-winning books, Dunham-Jones will show successful case studies and their design strategies for disrupting automobile dependence, improving public health, supporting an aging population, leveraging social capital for equity, competing for jobs and addressing climate change. 

Dunham-Jones is co-author with Williamson of two award-winning books. Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs (Wiley, 2009, 2011, Mandarin 2013) received a PROSE Award for best architecture and planning book of 2009. The sequel, Case Studies in Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Strategies for Urgent Challenges (Wiley, 2021), was named Place Book in the 2021 Great Places Awards presented by the Environmental Design Research Association. This series documents how successful retrofits of aging shopping centers, strip mall corridors, office parks, and other parking-lot-dominated properties are helping their communities. The work has been featured in The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, PBS, NPR, TED and other prominent venues.  

A fellow of both the Congress for the New Urbanism and the Brook Byers Institute of Sustainable Systems, Dunham-Jones lectures widely and conducts workshops and research on the many co-benefits of retrofitting and the potential urban design impacts of autonomous vehicles. She also serves on several national committees.  

Dunham-Jones has a Master of Architecture and a Bachelor of Science from Princeton University. She practiced architecture for 20 years and taught at the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville, Virginia, and at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, before being recruited to direct the architecture program at the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2000.   

Her lecture is a Martha Dellinger Memorial Lecture, given by Sharon and Jim Parker. 

The school is pursuing continuing education credits for this lecture through the American Institute of Architects.  

This lecture is free and open to the public. Seating is limited.