Metrocology served as lead master planner for a multi-disciplinary team of consultants tasked with transforming Gaithersburg’s first enclosed shopping mall into a mixed-use, high-density town center. The property’s prominent location within the City’s transportation network and within the minds of the residents who grew up visiting it for decades, necessitated a planning solution that addressed multiple design issues to achieve two broad goals. The first integrates employment, retail, transit, multiple housing types including affordable, and significant usable open spaces, in a walkable urban center, and the second projects the walkable urban character of the redevelopment outwards to influence the redevelopment of adjacent suburban, car dependent developments.

The Master Plan achieves both goals through deliberate integration with the surrounding street network, as well as existing and planned transit improvements. To influence the redevelopment of surrounding properties into walkable, urban development, all new buildings along the perimeter of the property face outwards onto the adjoining street system, transforming the suburban perimeter roads into urban streets. The existing water detention ponds are incorporated into this outward facing civic realm by reimagining them as amenities within parks. The creation of a street grid and transit station on the property allows for blocks to be developed capable of supporting a high density program of retail, residential, and employment.