Light rail and a real downtown for Kentlands?
The iconic new urban community is set for more changes in the coming decade, according to a plan created recently by the original design team.

Robert Steuteville

Fifteen years ago, a group of architects met to design Kentlands in Gaithersburg, Maryland. The charrette, led by Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, merited a major feature in the New York Times. The coverage was prescient — Kentlands turned out to be one of the most influential real estate projects of the past two decades. It has since been studied extensively, has served as a model for dozens of other developments, and was influential in getting US Housing and Urban Development officials to change the nation’s public housing design standards.

Kentlands is now completely built, yet hardly finished. On the charrette’s fifteenth anniversary, the original designers met again to assess where the community succeeded and failed and to envision how Kentlands might grow and change in 15 years to come. The results of this exercise reveal much about the ability of new urban communities to adapt over time — and about the importance of planning for change. The reappraisal offers hope that proper design of a new greenfield community can encourage mass transit — even on sites where rail or bus service is not available at the outset.

		Kentlands’ downtown was designed with a grid of streets, shown above, to plan for the time when large parking lots and big box stores could be converted to urban buildings. A recent aerial view of development in Kentlands and Lakelands is below.
					Photos courtesy of Duany Plater-Zyberk

The three-day charrette, held in mid-June immediately before the Congress for New Urbanism convened in Washington for its annual conference, included about 10 of the original designers plus a contingent of other urbanists, including the eminent theorist Leon Krier. Here’s a brief summary of the lessons and accomplishments of the “recharrette”:

• Through Kentlands’ downtown, participants drew a corridor of light rail, which, if built, would further connect the community to the Washington, DC, Metro system. (A bus currently travels this route.) Authorities intend to build the rail line in the next decade, but on a path that skirts by Kentlands, on the opposite side of a difficult-to-cross arterial road. Given Kentlands’ high density and large pedestrian shed, shifting the route to go through the center of the community makes sense.

“We thought about transit during the original charrette and designed the median wide enough [in Kentlands Boulevard] to accommodate it,” explains Mike Watkins of Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company, Kentlands’ town architect. The new plan places the light rail stop at a location that would maximize ridership and justify the few minutes of travel time that the detour into Kentlands would require, Watkins says. The new plan should convince planners that a new route is feasible, he adds.

• The plan calls for steady densification and more mixed uses in Kentlands’ downtown. Washington Post architecture critic Benjamin Forgey called the result “radical.” Gone, in the plan for the next 15 years, are the single-use buildings, large parking lots, and big-box stores of Kentlands’ current downtown. In their place are a “grid of streets defined by buildings of five stories or more,” Forgey writes. “It would become, in other words, more a city center than a town center.” Duany agrees. “The really big move during the next 15 years is that the downtown can become great,” he says.

Even before the recent charrette, the downtown’s transformation had begun. A failed big box department store, Uptons, was torn down this year to make way for about 300 apartments and 10,000 square feet of ground floor retail.

• The new plan was helped by the original charrette’s vision. Although the 1988 plan included a conventional shopping center, planners foresaw a day when the retail district would evolve. To facilitate that, Kentlands’ downtown was built on an urban block and street system (see image). “That’s always been the intention,” says Watkins. “It’s the reason that utilities were built under the streets, not the parking lots.” The new plan supports the notion that new urbanists should never give up on the block and street structure — even in big-box districts.

• From a design standpoint, Kentlands’ residential and civic components have achieved more success to date than has the downtown. To walk through Kentlands’ residential neighborhoods is to be constantly surprised by new vistas and interesting spaces. Market Square — the downtown which serves Kentlands and Lakelands, its sister community — fills a vital role, but still feels like a shopping center. Residents of Kentlands can buy nearly everything they need in their downtown, but “architecturally it is not good-looking or stylish,” says Duany.

The exceptions are the streets framed by 50 live/work buildings — the only part of downtown that feels really good. The live/work buildings, constructed by two production builders, may not be architecturally distinguished, but they are mixed-use and are sited on small, individually owned lots, which makes a big difference. Because of the diverse ownership and somewhat lower rents, they house a wide, interesting range of locally owned businesses — from stores to professional services.

• Kentlands’ design is more successful than that of Lakelands, which was laid out in 1996 by DPZ and built much more quickly. Though Lakelands’ plan fulfills all the requirements of New Urbanism, Lakelands is much less interesting to walk. Its streets offer fewer surprises and variations.

One common explanation is that Lakelands was built by a few production builders, with less architectural oversight. In Kentlands, more care and attention was lavished on details such as porch roofs, terminated vistas, and streetscape variety during the project’s early days.

• From a financial standpoint, Lake-lands outpaced Kentlands. Lakelands benefited from its positive association with Kentlands and was built and sold during a strong real estate market, achieving more than 400 sales annually for several years.

• Not all Kentlands public spaces were built as planned. Due to traffic engineering considerations, a road was constructed through a traffic circle that is the site of important civic buildings — a school and a church. That public space was redesigned during this June’s charrette. If the new design is implemented, it will produce a more successful space (see illustrations below).

The recharrette reinforced the notion that even complete communities can change, and that new urban developments are conducive to modification. Says Watkins: “The most important thing to come out of the charrette is the idea that Kentlands can be better, and residents have seen one version of how it can happen.”

						A Kentlands traffic circle, above, was altered when a road was routed through the circle by transportation planners. The charrette team redrew plans for the intersection — the site of a school and a church — to reclaim lost park space and achieve better spatial definition (below).
			Kentlands’ downtown was designed with a grid of streets, shown at right, to plan for the time when large parking lots and big box stores could be converted to urban buildings. A recent aerial view of development in Kentlands and Lakelands is below.
						Images courtesy of Duany Plater-Zyberk