Columbia, Maryland

Planned for a population of over 100,000 on 13,838 acres, and opened in 1967, Columbia, Maryland, was famous for two contributions—the Columbia concept of racial integration and the Columbia economic model, an early financial analysis tool. The development was the pet project in the 1960s of developer James Rouse (1914–1996). Described both as a committed Christian and an unabashed liberal, Rouse had been involved with early urban renewal projects and in 1958 had built the first speculative enclosed shopping mall. He later established the Enterprise Foundation, a major organization involved with community revitalization.

By the early 1960s, Rouse had become worried about the dominant architecturally based approach to planning. In a number of venues, including a widely circulated 1963 speech delivered at the University of California at Berkeley, he proposed an alternative form of development focused on human growth, learning, participation, and social diversity. In the early 1960s, Rouse started to assemble land for a new town in Howard County, Maryland. Although employing a team of physical planners, in late 1963 and early 1964 Rouse also organized a fourteen-person social planning work group to propose ideas for this development. Although it met for only a few days a month, the group developed general recommendations about issues such as racial and economic mix, education, recreation, transportation, and the situation of youth. While not all the work group's ideas were incorporated into Columbia's planning, the group's role was widely promoted and used in marketing to attract residents interested in alternatives to generic suburban development.

Columbia had a distinctive philosophy of community and used a number of specific strategies to achieve it. Rouse was interested in racial and economic mix. The sociologist Herbert Gans, a member of the social planning work group, proposed that racial mix should be at the house level. This was a strong stand in a county that did not desegregate its schools until the mid-1960s. However, reflecting the findings of his earlier work in Levittown, Gans proposed that houses in the same cul-de-sac or small cluster should have a similar economic level because that was a likely predictor of having common interests and values and therefore the potential for friendly neighboring. Columbia has always done a better job at racial than economic mix, remaining around one-fifth to one-quarter African American since the 1970s and having a low level of racial segregation. Although Columbia has some subsidized housing, its main mechanism for promoting economic mix has been through providing a diversity of housing types and sizes.

Rouse was also attracted to the idea of re-creating [Page 213]small-town life. Accordingly, Columbia is organized into a series of villages of approximately 10,000 people each and made up of three or more neighborhoods. Each village has a village center that contains a mix of shops, offices, and educational, recreational, and civic facilities in a campus-style arrangement.

Children in Columbia, Maryland, participate in a safety house fire drill in 2001.

Richard T. Nowitz/Corbis; used with permission.

In the early days, Columbia attracted a unique group of pioneering residents, captivated by Rouse's vision. There has always been some tension in Columbia, with periodic accusations of racism occurring since the very start. From time to time there have also been discussions about low-income populations, in spite of their fairly low numbers—either advocating for more low-cost housing or complaining about subsidized tenants. However, Columbia stands out in terms of being a successful self-consciously heterogeneous suburb. While the early spirit of Columbia has dimmed somewhat over the years, it is still in evidence.

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