The SEASIDE Institute™ recently announced 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.

Since 1993, the Seaside Prize has recognized outstanding contributions in architecture, urban design, and related fields. Honorees include the founders of the Congress for the New Urbanism—Peter Calthorpe, Elizabeth Moule, Stefanos Polyzoides, and Daniel Solomon—along with renowned architects such as Christopher Alexander, Alex Cooper, and Giancarlo DeCarlo. Visionaries like Jane Jacobs, Charleston Mayor Joseph P. Riley, Jr., and Seaside town founders Daryl and Robert Davis have also been celebrated. The list of laureates extends to writers Witold Rybczynski and James Howard Kunstler, urban designer Allan B. Jacobs, and many more influential figures.

The Seaside Prize took a hiatus in 2021 due to the pandemic but returned in 2022, honoring Jeff Speck for his contributions to New Urbanism and the architectural community. Each year, the Seaside Institute hosts a weekend-long celebration featuring community activities, guest speakers, and a ceremony for the award recipient. In 2023, the Prize was awarded to Donald Shoup, an esteemed author and research professor of urban planning at UCLA, continuing the tradition of acknowledging excellence and innovation in urban development. For the 30th anniversary of the Seaside Prize in 2024, the SEASIDE Institute honored Victor Dover and Joe Kohl, founders of Dover, Kohl and Partners, for their pioneering efforts in town planning and urban reform, revitalizing traditional towns, addressing urban sprawl, and fostering meaningful citizen involvement in city planning.

In 2025, 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 February 7 through February 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, reinhabitation, 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 February 8, 2025, by Seaside, Florida, 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.