The suburb is a landscape built for cars, not for people. But suburbs are changing, as shifting demographics, new technologies, and changing patterns of work and leisure make a landscape of strip malls and single-family houses increasingly untenable.

WORKac believes that a dramatically different future is possible. As climate change urges density, and sustainable development and new technologies transform how we live, shop, work, move, and interact, we have an opportunity to reinvent suburban life. Commissioned by the Regional Plan Association to help bring its fourth Regional Plan to life, WORKac proposes to automate mobility and reduce the personal car; reintroduce natural ecosystems to suburban life; let the strip malls disappear and create a walkable streetscape in their place; integrate living and working; embrace density and diversity; and invent new community institutions. The suburb of the future will be a place where we can live, work, and play alongside nature.

WORKac’s speculative urban design proposal, “Inventing the Corridor Downtown,” imagines the transformation of an unremarkable stretch of strip malls and parking lots over the next fifty years.