Is Kentlands Better than Radburn?: The American Garden City and New Urbanist Paradigms

Abstract

This article compares the two developments—Radburn in Fair Lawn, New Jersey, and Kentlands in Gaithersburg, Maryland—that exemplify the American Garden City and New Urbanist paradigms, respectively. Through a morphological case study and quantitative analysis, we examine how their goals and prescriptions were realized in suburban residential developments and how they differ from each other. In the end, Radburn and Kentlands are not so completely opposed as they initially appear. They share the underlying goal of a walkable residential environment, and their prescriptions are very similar. However, in terms of walk-ability, Kentlands' interconnected grid cannot resolve the conflict between automobiles and pedestrians. Additionally, overemphasis on variety in housing types and styles in Kentlands, probably common in New Urbanism, may work against the marketability and long-term success of such planned suburban communities. Their similarities in scale, development density, mixed land use scheme, and block plan allow us to try complementary shuffling of the individual elements in both sets of prescriptions.