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The New Urbanists' wet dream. Reston Town Center is a financial success and, as judged from its creators' Disney-esque idea of urbanity, an aesthetic one too. But it is completely soulless. One hopes that, with time, it will acquire an identity in the same way idiots become sages when they become old men. As Noah Cross observes in Chinatown, "Politicans, ugly buildings, and whores all become respectable if they last long enough." Here the buildings are not ugly, just bland. And the streets are not devoid of life, just pointless. Market Street (Main Street, as re-coined by a focus-group thinking "outside-the-box"--there never was, and probably never will be, a market here) runs east to west and goes nowhere you want to go. The real automotive arteries here form the moat-like circumference of this faux-urban dreamworld and they are as unpassable on foot as they are unpleasant to the eye. Real cities, of course, have subways and homeless people and they aren't blessed with mall-like "directories" on their sidewalks or quaint streets that are quaint because they are untrafficked. I will give Town Center this: it has the right idea about density. And it is not the fault of its planners that Americans are so dependant on their cars that they cannot countenance an evening's amble for a cup of yogurt but they must guzzle gas and pollute the air with their smog and the eye with their roads. But one hopes that this is not a vision of the future: a bland and condescendingly cleansed urban theme park that banishes the very thing that draws people to cities anyway: dangerousness and unpredictability. In other words, vitality. |