Places

Reimagining Public Space: A Merit Award for Placemaking on Bethesda Avenue

Posted: by

This blog is part of a series that highlights the winners of the 2025 Design Excellence Awards.

Placemaking is the act of improving a common space to make it welcoming and attractive, so it better serves the needs of the people who use it. It is both a process and an outcome. As a process, it is a collaborative effort to plan, design, and manage public spaces in ways that enhance community health, happiness, and well-being. It relies on active participation from community members to create a shared vision: transforming ordinary spaces into vibrant destinations that strengthen connections between people and their environment.

As an outcome, placemaking results in spaces that foster social interaction, environmental stewardship, economic vitality, and health. … Continue reading

Design Excellence in Bethesda: How The Sophia elevates urban living

Posted: by

This blog is part of a series that highlights the winners of the 2025 Design Excellence Awards.

Architecture demands an expression in response to different settings.  It is based on an evolving common understanding of the structure of places, subject to reinterpretation by each architect. Architects should value what exists through sensitive and thoughtful designs that are generative and timeless so that all buildings become a point of departure within their urban context for subsequent building designs.

Architectural style should emerge from the adaptation, evolution, and transformation of buildings and landscapes within their regional context. From this foundation, an appropriate design language for a building can be determined. For a residential building, a modern aesthetic can coexist with comfort and elegance … Continue reading

Delivering more benefits for communities through development

Posted: by

Montgomery County just updated its policy that drives the amenities communities receive with new development

Every day, Montgomery County residents and visitors enjoy the public benefits of private development.

At Pike & Rose in North Bethesda, sculptures and colorful murals and landscaping greet diners and shoppers. Another nearby development, Strathmore Square, encircles a 1.2-acre publicly accessible park with space for pop-up markets and performances. The United Therapeutics office building in downtown Silver Spring generates its own solar power, giving it a net-zero carbon footprint. Marriott’s high-rise headquarters in downtown Bethesda includes a wide, lighted walkway between Wisconsin and Woodmont avenues. Many of these developments also offer subsidized, affordable housing options for county residents.

Such amenities help make new developments … Continue reading

Montgomery County’s Population Rebound, Part 2: A comparison with our neighbors

Posted: by

Montgomery Planning’s Research and Strategic Projects Division tracks population trends to help planners and public officials plan the county’s future and determine how we can best create attractive communities and remain economically competitive in the Washington, DC region and beyond. In Part 1 of this blog series, we explained the latest U.S. Census Bureau estimates showing how Montgomery County’s population has started to rebound from the losses it experienced from COVID-19 pandemic. In this follow-up analysis, we can see how it has fared compared with the rest of the region.

Overview of our analysis

Census data estimates show Montgomery County lost fewer people to other areas of the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic and has begun recovering … Continue reading

The Search for Montgomery County’s Lost Burial Grounds

Posted: by

Searching for Lost Cemeteries

Montgomery Planning maintains the Montgomery County Burial Sites Inventory, a listing of over 300 cemeteries and burial sites around the county dating from before the arrival of Europeans in Maryland to burial grounds still in use today. However, there are 80 burial sites in the inventory that are no longer visible, and historical records only tell us approximately where they were. This may be because the graves were never marked, or the markers have been moved or have deteriorated. We are looking for these lost burial grounds, and we hope to get some help from modern technology – ground penetrating radar (GPR) – to recover this part of the county’s hidden past.

What is GPR? … Continue reading

Kids in Tow

Posted: by

By James Hedrick, Commissioner, The Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission

Montgomery Parks Summer Adventure Challenge with Kids

I don’t know anything about parks.

I’m a Commissioner on the Montgomery County side of The Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission (M-NCPPC), and I really don’t know anything about parks.

My background is in affordable housing and development – the planning side of the Commission. Most of what I know about parks is limited to about a decade of taking my kids to parks hoping that they will wear themselves out before bedtime.

Given my need to expand my knowledge of Montgomery County’s parks system, the Commission’s August recess offered a good opportunity to become more familiar with at least … Continue reading

UMD Students ‘Reveal the Art of the Possible’ in Silver Spring

Posted: by

You don’t need to be a novelist to tell a great story; you don’t even have to be a great writer. Storytelling through architectural rendering is a centuries-old way of expressing the relationship between design and the construction of buildings in the world around us. Architectural renderings can also give context to our cultural understanding of places and can inspire visions of those places and our society into the future.

Several groups of graduate students at the University of Maryland School of Architecture, Planning & Preservation set out to tell an architectural design story to reimagine downtown Silver Spring. Professors Matt Bell and Georgianne Matthews guided students in the Graduate Urban Design Studio this past fall as they studied … Continue reading

Thrive Montgomery 2050: Less driving with concentrated growth will lead to a more sustainable environment

Posted: by

Lessons learned from Portugal

This past May, I had the pleasure of traveling through Portugal on a greatly anticipated summer, post-COVID trip. What a beautiful country and what a perfect example of concentrated, walkable mixed-use communities, which are found in all its small, medium and larger cities and towns. Portugal, as well as a large portion of Europe shows us impressive examples of how to save energy and resources through the concentration of buildings and then connects those communities with simple, easy to use transit systems consisting of trains, trams, buses, cars, bikes, carts and scooters. It is walkable concentrated development linked by multimodal transportation at its best! I strongly suggest you visit Portugal if you can. The urbanism, … Continue reading

Honoring my heritage: How Montgomery Planning’s Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Project brought me closer to my family

Posted: by

Montgomery County’s first AAPI Heritage Project is examining the history of AAPI county residents as early as the 1900s

By Karen Yee

Of the 86,000 sites listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the nation’s repository of historic structures, sites, buildings, districts and objects that are deemed significant to American history, less than 8% relate to Asian Americans and other underrepresented communities. In Montgomery County, where 15% of residents are Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI), there is only one locally designated resource associated with AAPI heritage, the Pao-Chi and Yu Ming Pien House. Even this house was only recently recognized—it is located within the Potomac Overlook Historic District, designated in April 2022. In order to address this … Continue reading

Honoring nationally renowned historic figure, the Rev. Josiah Henson

Posted: by

A conversation with Montgomery Planning Director Gwen Wright on the newly renamed Josiah Henson Parkway

By Gwen Wright and Karen Blyton

On March 4, 2022, community members and government leaders witnessed history as street signs were installed one week after the Montgomery Planning Board approved a resolution to rename Montrose Parkway in honor of the Rev. Josiah Henson. The new Josiah Henson Parkway in North Bethesda runs through the former plantation property of Isaac Riley, where Henson was enslaved for many years before escaping to freedom in Canada. Just a few blocks south of Josiah Henson Parkway is the Josiah Henson Museum and Park, which is also part of the Riley property and is operated by Montgomery Parks.

Henson, … Continue reading