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The National Mall of Washington, DC is indisputably world famous. Our monumental core is not just the symbol of our city, in the minds of many Americans it *is* our city. But if the Mall is the symbol of Washington, is it also the city's heart and soul?
The answer, for anyone who lives here, must be no.
The Mall, celebrated as it is, functions practically as a separate entity from the rest of the city. Tourists tend to stay within its confines, while residents rarely bother. In the push to make the Mall a monument to America's greatness, planners forgot that it's part of a working city. The result is a single-use district that functions on its own terms, but may as well be in a different universe than the surrounding neighborhoods. From an urbanist perspective, the National Mall isn't the monumental core of Washington; it's a hole in the city fabric to be skipped across during the course of day-to-day business.
That's a real shame. In a better world, the functioning city and the monumental core would work together. Rather than a gap in the fabric, the Mall would be the great central civic space of the city.
Such a better world is possible, but it will take a paradigm shift in Mall-planning thinking. For years Mall planning has been dominated by proposals for expansion. Not just a bigger National Mall, but entire new Malls cut into the city along South Capitol Street and the Metropolitan Branch. That paradigm supposes that more parkland is always better than quality urbanism, and that the obvious solution to any question is "more parks!" But that paradigm is wrong. The best parks are framed by great neighborhoods, and the whole point of parkland is to improve the places we inhabit. When cultures stop building parks in cities and start building cities in parks, the result is Fairfax County. And no offense to Northern Virginia, but Washington, DC is better.
The National Capital Planning Commission can then be commended for drafting a Mall Framework Plan that seeks to "create vibrant and accessible destinations in the federal precincts around the National Mall", or in other words, to reconnect the city and the Mall. Though BeyondDC has nits to pick here and there (see the chapter notes at right), especially with regards to the plan's treatment of transit infrastructure as something to be hidden rather than embraced, for the most part the Framework Plan "gets it", which is really fabulously good news.
The plan is currently in draft form and is open for public comment until October 10, 2008. To comment, send an email to FrameworkPlan [at] ncpc [dot] gov or write to: |
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