Special Features

Image Libraries

Blog
Germantown’s sort of urban central park

Germantown Town Center is not a triumph of urbanism. Of all the suburban “new downtowns” built in the Washington region in the last 20 years, Germantown’s is probably the least impressive. It is essentially a suburban strip mall, anchored by a grocery store, with a handful of liner shops fronting onto a short “main street.” It’s surrounded by suburban-style apartment complexes, and has a library, a nice performing arts center, and a whole ton of surface parking lots.

And soon it will have a park. And actually, the park is pretty interesting.

Most of the parks in Germantown are either nature preserves, athletic fields, or playgrounds. There is a small town square, but nothing like DC’s Meridian Hill Park. Nothing where residents might visit on a Sunday afternoon to sit on a public bench, read a book, and watch the passers-by. No central community gathering place that hosts picnics, frisbee, and romantic strolls.

Thus the new central park, which broke ground last week. It will have a formal layout, with sculpted lawns, stone-faced trails, and a central pergola.


Park site plan.

The park is a nice enough design, and it’s very encouraging to see planning in a place like Germantown (which has almost 90,000 residents) move forward towards a more livable and sustainable urban model.

One major criticism of the park, however, is that it fails to produce an urban room. The best urban public spaces have clear walls that frame and help to define the space. They’re surrounded by buildings that front onto them, providing a sense of enclosure as well as activity and safety, and from which pedestrians can move freely. More than anything else, this is what separates the character of a good urban park from that of a rural path through the woods. A walk through the forest is a nice experience, but a different one.

Unfortunately, Germantown’s new central park is surrounded by parking lots, wide highways, and the backs of randomly placed buildings. Rather than providing a seamless connection to every surrounding property, most of the park’s boundary is blocked to pedestrians, who will have to enter and exit from designated walkways. There will be scant enclosure, and little if any sense that this is the center of Germantown.


Park location.

Internally this will be a nice enough park, and it is undeniably a step forward in Germantown’s urban design. But the same suburban conservatism that has hampered Germantown Town Center since its inception is also at work here. Neither the town center nor the park will live up to their potential as long as so many concessions to suburbanism are included in their design.

Sooner or later, the half measures will no longer seem impressive.

May 7th, 2012 | Permalink
Tags: development, urbandesign



Media

   
   



Site
About BeyondDC
Archive 2003-06
Contact

Search:

GoogleBeyondDC
Category Tags:

Partners
 
  Greater Greater Washington
 
  Washington Post All Opinions Are Local Blog
 
  Denver Urbanism
 
  Streetsblog Network



BeyondDC v. 2013d | Email | Archive of posts from 2003-2006