A suburban agglomeration becomes a downtown
New Urban News Article with images and sidebar, 12/1/2004
Kendall offers a glimpse of how an “edge city” can evolve with the help of a plan and a form-based code.
The roughly half-square-mile heart of Kendall in Dade County, Florida, is imprinted so deeply with conventional suburban development that it is difficult to imagine it changing in character. At the very center of Kendall is the 1.4 million sq. ft. Dadeland Mall, surrounded by parking, on a 70-acre parcel. To the north of the mall are low-rise apartment complexes, to the south are various commercial buildings — all auto-oriented, with no coherent urban design. The entire site is bisected by a functional drainage waterway called Snapper Creek and is bounded on the east by a mega-arterial, US Route 1.
In that environment the new urbanist firms of Dover, Kohl & Partners and Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company led a charrette in 1998 to design Downtown Kendall. The resulting plan envisioned so many radical changes that it seemed a fantasy. Gone were the parking lots, amorphous strip developments, and scores of single-use apartment buildings. Snapper Creek was reimagined as a Venice-like canal. The mall, though it remained, was to be hidden behind mixed-use buildings. An interconnected network of pedestrian-friendly streets was drawn across the 338-acre area, punctuated by more than a dozen squares and greens. The whole sector was overlaid with a form-based code geared to generate the intensive urbanism of a downtown. The county approved the code, and new urbanist traffic engineer Rick Hall designed streets for the new grid in 2002 and 2003.
