A book co-authored by June Williamson, Associate Professor of Urban Design in the Bernard & Anne Spitzer School of Architecture at The City College of New York (CCNY), has received a 2009 PROSE Award for Excellence from the American Association of Publishers (AAP).  “Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs,” co-written by Ellen Dunham-Jones and published by John Wiley & Sons, won in the architecture and urban planning category.

The book explores an area that has received little attention from urban designers – suburbia.  In it, the authors present case studies of conventional suburban building forms, e.g. shopping malls and office parks, which have been retrofitted to new forms and uses.  They also advocate a strategy of incremental metropolitanism in which urbanized nodes are developed along a region’s “corridors of strength,” often at the location of a failed shopping mall or other large site.

The PROSE Awards are presented by AAP’s Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division.  Awards were presented in 40 categories February 4 at the Division’s annual conference, held in Washington.  The winners were selected by a panel of 16 judges from 441 entries submitted by 60 professional and scholarly publishers throughout the United States.