Saturday, April 10, 2010

How can a new town be new 50 years later?

Just attended a Founder's Day celebration in Reston, Virginia.

It was interesting to see there weren't too many people my (middle) age around... most of my peers have also left this "new town" of the 1960s when we graduated from school.

Many of the parents of my peers from these pioneering families--now in their 70s and 80s, as well as founder and visionary Bob Simon, who turned 96 today, whom I had the pleasure of sitting next to--were wondering how to kickstart growth of the place, which is centered not around one but five (originally seven) villages.

I only recently learned that Reston is neither a city or town, but a community in Fairfax County, Virginia, which apparently is also a hot topic that thankfully wasn't raised here. (One of the issues is deciding what kind of government "fits" this community.)

What interested me--for personal reasons, as an associate member of a newer community in East Tennessee, the Template Homestead--was what the guest speaker (Alex Garvin, urban planner, Yale educator, and author) offered as a strategy for moving forward:

(1) Decide who you want to attract (people)
(2) Put aside the money to do that (secure finances)
(3) Identify what they will need (transit within and outside the community, coffee places, street life, find the best form of government, a good map to find the place
(4) Start putting those things in place for when the economy gets better and be ready to receive (1)

But most importantly, he said there is no "correct" way to do this.

For me, Bob Simon's quiet comment was apropos and simple: "He's good."