King Farm

King Farm, a 430-acre development not far from Kentlands, is trying to become a regional center that will attract workers from elsewhere. The plan includes mixed housing, land for two schools, acres of greenspace, and a modest shopping center (120,000 square feet) that will have a supermarket and amenities for day workers. Most significantly, a quarter of the site is dedicated to three million square feet of office space, a hotel, and a 675-car garage, aimed at the burgeoning high tech industry in the northern D.C. suburbs. This office complex is conveniently located near the last stop on one of the Metro lines.

King Farm aspires to be a small Edge City with neotraditional housing and all the mixed uses. Visiting the construction site I was put off by what seemed over-busy building design, too much segregation of housing types, and street patterns that took the spatial gestures of New Urbanist street patterns and increased their scale. In King Farm individual builders were given continuous swaths of land to work with, rather than scattered lots as at Kentlands. A traditional neighborhood development on steroids, King Farm may be a portent of what many developers may make out of New Urbanism.

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Kentlands is located