A handsome new book from Academy Press in Washington, DC, carries the inflated title Reston Town Center: A Downtown for the 21st Century. A more accurate, less puffed-up title would have been “Reston Town Center: A Downtown for the Suburbs.” The tradition-influenced center in northern Virginia’s 1960s “New Town” pursues a number of new urbanist ideas very skillfully, but falls short of being an ideal for cities, or for the century as a whole.
I’ve been visiting Reston Town Center periodically since it opened in 1990, and although I was happy to write one of the several essays in this 216-page, $45 hardcover, I’ve come away with mixed feelings about the Reston achievement. Others who have studied Reston Town Center, notably Charles Bohl, director of the Knight Program in Community Building at the University of Miami, have a similar sense that Reston Town Center is a mix of outstanding accomplishments and missed opportunities.
What’s exceptional about Reston Town Center is, above all, its ambition. When the Center was in the works, many doubted that a developer could make a financial success of constructing high-quality high-rise office buildings miles from an urban core and placing them along a narrow, pedestrian-scale street, with stores and restaurants on the ground floor. But the developers of Reston Town Center knew what they were doing.
“The early success of Reston Town Center’s hotel, retailing, dining, and entertainment helped offset a slower lease-up of the office space,” Bohl writes in a long and thoughtful introductory essay. “Its performance was consistently better than competing properties in the region through the early economic downturn of the 1990s and the freefall of the technology industry following the dot.com bust and the 9/11 attacks in 2001. The town center’s property values have soared, office and residential space rents and sells at a premium, and the retail, dining, and entertainment components are all … exceeding the average natural sales figures for their sectors.”
AN URBAN OASIS
Suburbanites come in droves on the weekends, reveling in the ability to stroll from shops and eating and drinking establishments to an urbane multiplex, a grand piazza, a lively ice skating rink, a good-looking hotel, and other amenities. Once there, people don’t have to drive from destination to destination. “A traffic study carried out by Wells & Associates in 2000 found that Reston Town Center generated nearly 50 percent less traffic than a comparably-sized suburban development,” Bohl reports.
In the book, landscape architect Alan Ward of Sasaki Associates explains how the Town Center’s plan evolved over the years, developer Thomas J. D’Alesandro IV tells how the goal of an intense mixed-use center progressed despite changes of ownership, and Robert Kettler of the development firm KSI discusses why his company decided in 2003 to purchase six acres with the vision of building 1,000 high-rise residential units.
Expensive condo units in towers and somewhat less expensive apartments in mid-rise buildings, all with high-quality conveniences close at hand, appeal to the region’s “growing market of buyers and renters with urban tastes.” Kettler says, “We have found that good architecture and good planning pay, at least a 15 percent premium.”
Architect Robert A.M. Stern, whose firm designed a 15-story residential tower to be constructed in 2008, says packing in enough parking is a challenge, so he has “placed as many cars below grade as was feasible and camouflaged the rest behind storefronts that line the sidewalks and maisonettes with stoops and street entries.” Stern says that to make “clearly defined public, semipublic, and private outdoor spaces,” each conceived as a specific place, he has employed time-honored urban techniques “such as wrapping apartment buildings around garden courtyards.”
What makes the Center appealing to so many? The Brooklyn-based writer Tom Vanderbilt thinks Virginians flock to venues such as Reston’s centrally located skating rink because of “an implicit attraction of city life … the ability to be both performer and voyeur, to see and be seen.”
NOT PUBLIC ENOUGH
What’s missing in Reston, though, is public space in a full legal sense. Genuine downtowns, like those being revivified, diversified, or expanded in urban cores throughout the US, offer streets, sidewalks, parks, and plazas where anybody can walk, hang out, distribute leaflets, or carry a placard without being told to leave by a private security guard. In Reston and many other new urbanist centers, the so-called public realm is privately owned and privately managed, limiting the rights of free speech and assembly. I’d like to see town center developers provide safety and cleanliness through less restrictive techniques — perhaps borrowing mechanisms such as “business improvement districts,” which have secured many downtown areas quite effectively.
Bohl identifies another deficiency: a lack of affordable housing. He seconds market specialist Todd Zimmerman’s recommendation that “multifamily housing be included at the beginning of a town center’s development.” At Reston, the housing was built mostly after property values had already skyrocketed, with the result that the residential population is skewed to the super-affluent. If the populace were more diverse, the atmosphere in turn might become less corporate and staid. Frankly, Reston Town Center on a weekday can bore the pants off a city-dweller.
Bohl points out that “the larger town center lacks, as of this writing, the types of civic institutions that are essential elements of every downtown — religious congregations, educational centers, town halls, post offices, museums, and so forth.” The key, he says, is to reserve sites for such institutions, recognizing that it may take years for them to arrive. Reston does have a public library, but it’s on the far side of one of the high-speed thoroughfares that separate the pedestrian precinct from the surrounding neighborhoods. Bohl says the thoroughfares “could be greatly enhanced by adopting design standards in keeping with urban boulevards and avenues.”
Clearly, Reston Town Center does quite a few things well, and has profited as a result. A virtue of this book, underwritten by Robert Kettler and KSI, is that although the text is largely positive, it presents some thoughts about how the town centers of the future could do better.
This article is available in the October/November 2006 issue of New Urban News, along with images and many more articles not available online. Subscribe or order the individual issue. |
Courtesy of KSI Services, Inc.