Presenting the 31st SEASIDE Prize™ Celebration
SEASIDE Institute™ announces Ellen Dunham-Jones and June Williamson as the 2025 Seaside Prize Recipients
By Kimberly Stanley
The SEASIDE Institute™ is thrilled to announce the recipients of the prestigious 2025 SEASIDE Prize™. The Prize, which is awarded annually, celebrates individuals who have made significant contributions to the fields of architecture, urban planning, and community development.
On this momentous occasion of the Seaside Prize, the Seaside Institute is honored to bestow this recognition upon two distinguished individuals: Ellen Dunham-Jones and June Williamson. The celebration will take place the weekend of Feb. 7 – 9, 2025, with a variety of events and symposia.
Architects and academics Ellen Dunham-Jones and June Williamson are co-authors of the groundbreaking Retrofitting Suburbia series of books. For over 20 years, they have documented and advocated for successful redevelopment, re-inhabitation, and regreening of dead shopping malls, aging office parks and other parking-lot-dominated real estate into more resilient, just, and community-serving places. Their book Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs (Wiley, 2008, updated 2011) won the Association of American Publishers PROSE Award for best architecture and planning book of the year. A sequel, Case Studies in Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Strategies for Urgent Challenges (Wiley, 2021), won a Great Places Book Award from the Environmental Design Research Association. Their work has been widely featured, including in the New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, PBS, and TED.
Ellen Dunham-Jones is professor and director of the MS in Urban Design at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, where she hosts the Redesigning Cities podcast series. She has been honored as the 2018–19 Woman Educator of the Year by Architectural Record, the 2023 Plym Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Illinois and by Planetizen in 2017 and 2023 as one of the 100 most influential urbanists. Author of over 100 papers and book chapters on contemporary design theory and practice, she maintains the suburban retrofit database, tracking over 2,500 entries.
She is a Fellow and past board chair of the Congress for the New Urbanism and currently serves on the steering committee of the Urban Design Academic Council.
June Williamson is professor and director of Graduate Programs in Architecture at The City College of New York’s Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture. Her sole-authored book Designing Suburban Futures: New Models from Build a Better Burb (Island Press, 2013) contextualizes and documents an innovative urban design ideas competition for re-envisioning suburban areas of Long Island. She serves on the board of directors of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture. She has practiced and taught architecture and urban design across the United States in New York City, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Salt Lake City, and Boston.
The Seaside Prize is a testament to the tremendous impact June Williamson and Ellen Dunham-Jones have had on the built environment. Their books and teachings inspire architects, planners, urban designers, developers, and community leaders to retrofit aging, underperforming suburban properties to address urgent challenges, disrupt automobile dependence, improve public health, support an aging society, leverage social capital for equity, compete for jobs, and add water and energy resilience. Together they have worked to bring change to education and to communities to “Retrofit Suburbia.”
The Seaside Institute will formally present the Seaside Prize to Ellen Dunham-Jones and June Williamson at the awards ceremony on Feb. 8, 2025, by Seaside founder Robert Davis. The ceremony will be hosted at The Chapel at Seaside, and it promises to be an evening of celebration, reflection and inspiration.
For more information about the Seaside Prize and the Seaside Institute, please visit our website at SeasideInstitute.org.
