Current suburban development is plagued by a number of problems, including dependence on the car and high land and energy consumption. Often, suburban designs have created situations where individuals have no choice but to drive for all of their daily needs (e.g., shopping, commuting to work or school, or recreation). The concept of sustainability applies to urban planning and civil engineering, whereby we hope to maintain the economic, environmental, and social aspects of communities, while allowing future generations the same opportunities we have had. However, because of diminishing resources, future generations may be required to travel without the widespread use of automobiles. Thus, reduced energy consumption may be achieved by having suburban neighbourhoods designed in such a way to allow people to walk or cycle for some of their needs, and to be well-connected to a regional transit system. For new development, it is relatively easy to meet some of these objectives, but there is the difficult question of what to do with the existing stock of already-built suburban neighbourhoods.

The research being done by Todd Randall for his PhD intends to identify the aspects within current suburban neighbourhoods that are amenable to retrofitting, and to provide a GIS-based prototype decision support system (DSS) to generate and evaluate possible retrofitting alternatives. The need to retrofit these elements is based upon an objective to have our suburban neighbourhoods become more sustainable. The proposed DSS will provide the user the opportunity to modify neighbourhood aspects, and then to evaluate the expected improvements to the neighbourhood. Aspects the user will be able to modify include: street and walkway designs; amount of green space for parks, community gardens and natural areas; per capita energy and water consumption; traffic reduction incentives such as traffic calming and the provision of a better streetscape to encourage cycling and walking; encouraging local employment and commercial activities within walking and cycling distances of homes; and provision of homes at varied costs and sizes to encourage multi-generational and mixed socio-economic neighbourhoods.

The proposed DSS will provide planners and engineers with an approach capable of weighing vast amounts of neighbourhood information, adjudicating it against sustainability criteria, and suggesting retrofit measures to solve specific problems or enhance specific neighbourhood characteristics. No such methodology to provide suburban retrofitting solutions currently exists. With the extensive areas of suburban sprawl surrounding many cities in North America, there will be a great deal of future work in retrofitting these areas to more sustainable forms. It is the hope that this research will be able to provide some insight on potential solutions and a prototype system to generate and evaluate suburban retrofitting alternatives.

The DSS is intended as a tool for the Urban Planner, Municipal Engineer, or individual/group involved in the urban planning process. It could be used at various stages within the planning process such as:

1. during the development or review of a community's Official Plan;
2. at the time of street re-paving, where retrofit options could be explored and evaluated; or,
3. when additional development is planned for an existing suburban neighbourhood.

The DSS will incorporate spatial data of suburbs by using ESRI's ArcView Geographic Information System (GIS) software, and will accept user-defined information for desired neighbourhood characteristics. Retrofitted neighbourhood plans generated by the DSS are to be drawn using AutoCAD software. For each data set, it is hoped that the DSS would provide a number of options to the user, plus a set of staged "snapshots" showing how the retrofitting may occur over a certain time frame. It is intended that these "snapshots", along with other output from the DSS, will work in tandem with the results of the research being done in the Virtual Communities section.