In Willingboro, a center existed to be repaired. Often more recent suburbs lack even that. "The poster child for car-oriented commercial development in the suburbs," is how Montgomery County planner Margaret Rifkin sums up White Flint, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C. Along the highway that scores through White Flint, multiple landowners hold large parcels, each with the capacity to develop into its own island. At intersections along the highway, pedestrians must cross five lanes of traffic just to reach a median. Surface parking blankets the land.

Planners feared an agglomeration of multiple centers that no one would ever dream of walking between. And yet, in consulting with the community, they found an encouraging level of consensus around the idea of a dense, mixed-use, transit-oriented town center. "Folks want to see an urban village," says Rifkin, "a place that's lively, that they'd enjoy going to in the evening with their families. They want it to be green, not only in the way it looks, but in the way it functions."

Building on the region's recent planning successes with nearby Bethesda and Silver Spring, Montgomery County's award-winning plan will turn White Flint into an urban center with a mixture of uses concentrated around its metro station. Over the next 20 years, a projected 9,800 new residences will more than quadruple existing housing, and 2,600 of these new residences will be designated for affordability. The plan provides for local parks and a civic green located at a junction along logical walking routes. A network of finer streets breaks down large blocks to pedestrian scale, and slows traffic. And that airstrip of a highway is slated to become a boulevard with trees and crosswalks.

To facilitate implementation, the county has in place a financing plan and a staging plan. White Flint's zoning strategy has been retooled so that entitlements and trades, under standard and optional methods of permitting, form a clear continuum. The planning department has received three early development proposals under the new plan already, says Rifkin, and these are now moving forward.

Much of the strength of White Flint's plan comes from its attention to the street network, and the underlying recognition that the street is, as Rifkin says, "a civic space. It's a space that belongs to the people." A similar recognition informs the Institute of Transportation Engineers' new recommended practice, "Designing Walkable Urban Thoroughfares: A Context Sensitive Approach." The practice treats the design of collector and arterial roads, types especially relevant to the suburbs. "The difference is flexibility and context sensitivity," says Brian Bochner, Senior Research Engineer with the Texas Transportation Institute at Texas A&M, and primary author of the practice.

The new approach contrasts with previous generations' emphasis on vehicle transportation. "People got aggressive, making transportation for a rapidly growing country, rapidly growing vehicle ownership, with an almost insatiable appetite for driving," says Bochner. "Downtowns were abandoned, communities decayed because driving was just easier." The new practice hearkens back to when multi-modal roadways formed part of the fabric of a community, serving and enhancing activity along their way. It requires a collaborative and transparent design process, and flexibility in reaching a solution, "not just for the transportation function, but everything that goes on around it."

The redevelopment of an 18-acre surface parking lot at the Pleasant Hill Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) station in Contra Costa County, thirty miles northeast of San Francisco, piloted the new context-sensitive approach. Where traditional processes had resulted in a decades-long string of failures, this time the community reached near-unanimous consensus. "The suburbs are the American dream for a lot of people, despite all the negative aspects," says Jim Daisa, Associate Principal at Ove Arup and transportation consultant to the project, "so it's challenging to get them to accept higher density." Daisa credits the ultimate consensus to a six-day charrette involving more than 500 participants.

An interdisciplinary team with no predetermined solutions worked with local leaders and a full range of stakeholders to address multiple concerns at once—circulation, aesthetics, land use, financing, environment, and character. The leaders made a firm commitment to the community that what was agreed at the charrette would be what got built on the site. Throughout the process, a renderer worked in a public workshop so people could watch their ideas develop. "The bottom line is you've got to get out there and work with the community and the people," says Daisa.

1 Merck-Medco mail-service pharmacy 2 Delco Development office building 3 Public library with new retail component 4 Satellite branch of Burlington County College and Strayer University 5 New town center: green forecourt, town commons, and ampitheater 6 Residential development 7 Vegetated stormwater swales Photo: MTC Aerial Photography

The scheme that earned the go-ahead consisted of a mixed-use, transit-oriented development on the parking lot, with the adjacent six-lane arterial road converted to a pedestrian-friendly streetscape with ground-floor retail, street trees, and furnishings on the project side. While the Pleasant Hill project has received criticism from outside the community for some of its compromises, Daisa sees the transit-oriented density and improved pedestrian environment as successful examples of incremental change based on community consensus. "I don't call it giving in," he says. "I call it negotiating."