Rockville(ish) Town Centers

Can private, self-contained urban simulacra be "urbanism"?

I have a new piece in Greater Greater Washington on the “town center” development: a popular redevelopment form for old malls or other large properties which combines retail, residential, and sometimes offices, with an urban-style walkable grid.

I argue that town centers are, all things being equal, a good innovation and a better use of space than single-use, low-rise commercial properties with huge surface parking lots, which is often what they’re replacing:

Most of it will never urbanize into anything like a historic city. For the most part, we will have to take what we can get. The question, instead, is to what extent urbanists should consider town centers a step towards true urbanism, or only an incremental improvement of the fundamentally suburban, car-oriented shopping center.

It is important to emphasize what is good about town centers. Mixed-use is a better use of space than single-use. Residential density paired with amenities is good, and more homes are good.

In many ways, the town center is the realization of a very early conception of the mall, which included housing and was a suburban downtown of sorts rather than a purely commercial destination. The amount of stuff that can fit into the footprint of an old mall and its massive parking lots is striking, and these conversions, especially when the malls or shopping centers were at the end of their useful life, are good.

Despite the movie-set, “fake city” feel you get a little of, some town centers are quite nicely done. For example, I wrote about Reston Town Center here, and in this new piece I focus on two town centers in Montgomery County, Maryland: one in and one just outside of Rockville. They’re all pleasant enough places to visit and do some eating/shopping. I’ve never lived in one of these places, and the online chatter about the price and quality of the apartments is not great, but they look like they’d be nice places to live.

Town centers also represent, to some extent, the victory of a kind of watered-down, mainstreamed New Urbanism, and the victory of some broadly urbanist ideas over planning and development: the design element of mixed uses, residential density in suburbia, walkability, useful transit connections in suburbia (both Maryland town centers profiled, as well as the Reston Town Center with the Metro’s Silver Line Extension, are quite rail-accessible). This is not a small thing.

However, as I argue in my piece, town centers probably do not represent “true urbanism,” and while they may be a part of the slow urbanizing of suburbs, that project will ultimately have to rely on much broader, more organic, incremental, and smaller-scale development across much more land area.

My critique is sort of two-part: one, that town centers look like they may end up recapitulating the cycle of malls, competing with each other more than anything, with new ones leaving previous ones with less luster.

My other critique is that their propensity to favor big national retailers makes them regional more than local by nature, and that there’s a bit of a mismatch between the neighborhood form and the regional mall attraction aspect:

While the town center is often centrally located and marketed as a sort of “downtown,” it is still too large to be kept afloat by locals only. Town centers suffer from the same “scale” problem as malls — to thrive financially, they need to pull from a larger trade area than their immediate neighborhood. This, combined with the increasing number of town-center-style developments, may spell trouble.

At an event recently, at an otherwise nearly empty food hall across the street from the Rockville Town Square, I was chatting with someone from Montgomery County. He gestured to the town center and asked if I’d noticed how empty it felt, noting that Pike & Rose was newer and had pulled away some of the energy.

Payton Chung, an urbanist and real-estate professional I know, offered a counterpoint: these mixed-use town-center style developments can benefit from, and their customers/neighborhoods can benefit from, the selection/curation aspect of a single commercial landlord.

Sometimes I write about how people seem to think a mayor can just pick and choose which businesses to put somewhere. “They should put a hardware store in here,” etc. It doesn’t work like that, of course, but a major landlord can actually do that a little bit.

I would still argue that distributed and local ownership, along with physically smaller retail spaces, are crucial for the spirit of “urbanism”—the variety and diversity and the positive-sum aspect of more people. But I certainly can see how that can work alongside these sorts of tightly managed, master-planned developments.

My main point is not that town centers, or even malls, are bad, but just a conceptual caution to not simply see tall buildings and pretty tree-lined streets and thinking “that must be urbanism.”

One of the themes I come back to over and over again here is that what we mean by “urbanism” is a package of ideas, land uses, design elements, and commercial/business elements, all together. This is not reducible to a built form alone. And as I often argue, I think it can even exist outside of a properly urban form.

In fact, ironically, I think the suburbs are often more “urbanist” than either the legacy cities or these modern mixed-use developments. So I’m not passing judgment on these modern developments, but I think imitating the urban form in and of itself is worth less than generating the distributed, organic elements that really make genuine cities what they are.

Check out the whole piece over at Greater Greater Washington!

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Related Reading:

Nooks and Crannies

Christmas Time In the Fake City

A Little More on Rockville Pike

300 People and History in Clifton, VA

Occoquan, Virginia’s Embrace of Old and New

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