About Retrofit Atlas
A public, citable record of what became of America's dead malls, built on the Retrofitting Suburbia research database.
Where the data comes from
Ellen Dunham-Jones (Georgia Tech) and June Williamson (City College of New York) have tracked suburban retrofits since their 2009 book Retrofitting Suburbia: dead malls, big boxes, office parks and strips that were redeveloped, reinhabited or regreened. Their faculty page states their database holds more than 2,500 cases (Georgia Tech faculty page); that figure is the authors' own public claim, not independently checked here, and the scope of their underlying workbook is unconfirmed. This site holds 1902 sites: 180 retrofits from the authors' public map, the rest dead or demolished malls drawn from Wikipedia and Wikidata whose fate is being recorded one by one. Owners, dates and areas come from Wikidata where it has them; narrative text adapted from Wikipedia keeps its CC BY-SA licence and is marked as such; photos are Wikimedia Commons files with their own credit on each page.
How a record is marked
| Curated | Taken from the authors' public 2021 interactive map, as published. Not yet reviewed by them for this site. |
|---|---|
| Draft | Imported from Wikipedia and Wikidata, or drafted by a model from a news article with the supporting sentences kept. Not yet reviewed. |
| Contributed | Submitted by a developer, broker, city or student through the form. Reviewed before it appears; the contributor is credited. |
What the three strategies mean
Redeveloped: the mall is demolished and the site rebuilt, usually as streets, housing and mixed use. Reinhabited: the building stays and new uses move in: clinics, colleges, offices, churches, libraries. Regreened: pavement and buildings give way to parks, wetlands and daylighted streams. Many cases combine two.
How to use it
- Every mall has a permanent page. Cite it, link to it, embed the badge.
- Download the table from the data page. Licence: undecided, research use only, until terms are agreed with the authors. Wikipedia excerpts stay CC BY-SA 4.0.
- Found a mistake or a missing mall? Tell us. Changes go through a review queue before they appear (being built).
Who runs it
A prototype built in October 2026 by Staffbox (Atlanta), derived from the authors' public map. The records are maintained by Staffbox AI agents: a news watcher runs every six hours and files items to a review queue, extraction workers fill fields from public pages only with a verbatim quote attached, assessment workers write each site's assessment from its own record, and a person reviews before a record is marked verified. Not affiliated with or endorsed by the authors. Operating terms, governance and the license are being discussed with them. Until then this is a working draft, not indexed by search engines.