Weekend video: How will we retrofit suburbs?

Ellen Dunham-Jones, author of Retrofitting Suburbia, gave a talk at the TED conference about suburbs and the upcoming imperative to retrofit the failing parts of these places, like failed malls and dead office parks, to accommodate more compact living.

The first part of the talk goes over many of the sustainability issues with car-dependent development patterns. Regular readers should find these arguments very familiar. She then discusses reuse of vacant malls, big box stores, and the many other places that, as she points out, were once on the periphery of their metro regions but are now quite central.