For universities, planning schools and research

Retrofit Atlas grows from twenty years of academic work on suburban retrofits. Research use is free to browse today. Three things are on offer for departments and research groups while the licence with the authors is agreed.

1. Classroom and research access

A department licence: every student and researcher gets the full database, the CSV and SQLite downloads, the API and the codebook, with a citation standard for every record. Instructors get state fact sheets and a trends brief each term.

2. The academic edition

A non-public edition focused on the public-good impacts of retrofits (housing produced, tax base before and after, transit and walkability change, climate and hazard exposure, who lives nearby), maintained for the authors and their research partners, with the enriched database returned to them for their own work.

3. Sponsored research

Questions the data can now test at scale: which policy tools precede built retrofits, how long dead malls wait by market, what replaces anchors, where housing lands. We co-design the question, run the agents, and the department publishes. Funding routes we are exploring: foundation and federal programmes in planning and housing, and university sponsored-research agreements.

Request a department licence Download the data Methods and limits

Built on the Retrofitting Suburbia research of Ellen Dunham-Jones and June Williamson. Not affiliated with or endorsed by the authors or their universities. Terms are being discussed.