Bold designs for building new suburban futures to redress pressing social, economic and environmental challenges at all scales are urgently needed. Suburbs contain millions of acres of land that are vacant or dedicated to asphalt parking lots. What can be achieved, through design, with these acres of opportunity? Designing Suburban Futures is a call to action for robust innovative architectural, urban, and landscape design to achieve future resiliency in the outdated suburbs of North America, those places surrounding central cities where the majority of the United States population now lives, and increasingly works. Using the results of the highly successful 2010 Build a Better Burb ideas urban design competition and its focus on Long Island (pop. ~3 million) as a point of departure, this lavishly illustrated book provides an important new resource for instigating change in the many other communities across the North American continent, and the globe, facing parallel challenges.

June Williamson is associate professor of architecture, urban design, and sustainability at The City College of New York. She is coauthor, with Ellen Dunham-Jones, of "Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solution for Redesigning Suburbs" (Wiley, 2009; Updated Edition, 2011), winner of a PROSE Award from the Association of American Publishers. Her writing has been published in Social Justice in Diverse Suburbs (Temple University Press, 2013), Independent for Life (University of Texas Press, 2012), and Writing Urbanism: A Design Reader (Routledge, 2008). She has received grants from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Study in the Fine Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Professional Staff Congress of CUNY, and the General Services Administration. In 2010, she conceived the Build a Better Burb competition for the non-profit Long Island Index. She received her BA from Yale University, MArch from MIT, and MUD from The City College of New York.