Columbians are the center

A new future for our village centers is onhand. When James Rouse envisioned the village center concept, he talked about a small town community center. His design was simply a central core surrounded by circles that represented the outlying village centers. Rouse did not promise us any specific tenants, he simply wanted the community to gather in central locations.

This is exactly what is being proposed by the new Columbia Village Center Market Study that will be presented on March 25 at the Wilde Lake Slayton House. Our community should be able to gather in central locations for years to come.  We anticipate that the re-imagined locations will be filled with vibrant active facilities that encourage the community to come together as never before. We can trust that this survey will guide us for decades to come with adaptive innovative uses that invigorate our underutilized cores of our village centers. The inefficient horizontal layout of our village centers will now soar vertically, enabling the best use of our resources, and send our gaze upward at the possibilities.

Rouse once said, “serious problems in society stem from the fact that the city is out of scale with the people”.  It is clear that our people view the village centers as out-of-scale with their expectations, and we need to re-scale them to prevent societal problems.