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"The first iteration is almost always horrible," said Harriet Tregoning, DC's planning director. Tregoning argued that communities need to be constantly vigilant and to push back through review and input.

An example of a federal building with negative impact is the FBI Building in downtown Washington. When asked if they thought it was "the worst building in DC," a significant portion of the audience raised their hands. Foreboding and removed from the street, this building serves as an example of what not to do.

On the other hand, the sheer number of workers a new federal office brings into an area can activate the neighborhood. This activity can spur more growth and create new urban fabric where there previously was none. They can give birth to entirely new neighborhoods, or revive ones long since written off.

Qualities of many federal facilities pose problems

Federal office buildings are inherently single-use. Office workers do little for neighborhoods after business hours. This can be especially damaging when agencies cluster, creating large single-use neighborhoods. By spreading offices throughout the region, federal projects can invigorate many different neighborhoods instead of negatively affecting just a handful.

Federal buildings farther from transit often use shuttle buses. These could also provide a desirable transit option for neighborhood residents, but security rules often bar them from riding. This has been part of the conversation around the Department of Homeland Security's new offices at the former St. Elizabeth's hospital site between Anacostia and Congress Heights.

Individual buildings can do a lot to help or hurt their neighborhood. The parking garage for the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) in Alexandria is lined with townhouses on two sides, but other sides are just screened and set back from the street with landscaping, creating a dead streetscape. Many projects fall into this same pattern, with a mix of successful and unsuccessful components.

Security drives many design decisions and harms communities

The General Services Administration (GSA) is working to reverse damage to the streetscape from its massive headquarters in Foggy Bottom. The building is currently entirely disconnected from the street, but GSA plans to bring retail back to the building's street frontage.

To do this, they had to get creative with a factor that hampers the design of many federal projects, security. Security drives a lot of design decisions for federal projects.

For example, the US Department of Transportation's building in the District's Navy Yard neighborhood takes up two entire city blocks, but has only one retail space along its entire façade, a Starbucks. It brings many workers to the area, but does little for the street.

In urban conditions, security hurts the streetscape by restricting building access from the street and for­bidding retail from lining the outside of buildings. In more suburban conditions it creates large campuses, cut off from what little grid there is and keeping workers from being able to activate the area around them. These large campuses also restrict the ability for planners to attempt to reconnect neighborhoods.

By adapting, many agencies are tackling these issues. The GSA's headquarters was formerly a Level 5 security building. In its renovation, they created a graduated security system, where not all areas of the buildings require the maximum security. As a result, almost all the security bollards around the building could be removed, a marked improvement to pedestrian conditions.

The lower level of security makes street level retail a possibility, and the GSA is looking into opening the building's cafeteria to the public, allowing the agency to share this amenity with their neighborhood.

Sustainability goes beyond LEED

Federal buildings built today have more environmentally-friendly design features. This demonstrates leadership and forward thinking from GSA and the agencies, but Rollin Stanley, Director of Planning for Montgomery County, was careful to remind the audience that the greenest building is the one that already exists, and urged federal designers not get too caught up in LEED.

A LEED Platinum building with no transit options but hundreds of free parking spaces will do more harm to the environment that a building built to lower environmental standards. There are many different factors to take into account to judge a building's true impact on the environment.

Many federal buildings, like many private buildings, are building more parking spots than they need to. Federal agencies are often surprised by how many workers will choose to commute in ways besides driving. At the Mark Center in Alexandria, offices for the Department of Defense were expected to produce massive gridlock. Instead, 50% of workers utilize transit to get to the site.

Little touches can do a lot

With creative designs, federal buildings can often make the most out of restrictions out of their control. The PTO's work in Alexandria requires constant delivery of packages between offices, so the hallways were placed facing the street. This allowed workers to make deliveries by daylight and activate the streetscape. The building could not have retail, but the PTO activated the street in a unique way.

Small-scale gestures have very positive effects on the areas around government offices. The PTO provides Wi-Fi in a small park adjacent to the offices and installed glass columns that light at night. Despite larger urban design failings, small gestures like these can make a big difference in neighborhoods.

Federal projects have their own strengths and weaknesses, but each gains from the collective knowledge of the projects that have come before. Agencies are generally moving towards better designed buildings, closer to transit, that give workers more flexibility. We will surely witness missteps along the way, but the trajectory for these buildings and the positive change they can bring to the areas is promising.

People walking along 23rd clearly don't want to, and shouldn't have to, cross up to 6 roads just to traverse the circle. Instead, they cross where there is no light and then walk on the grass. Well-worn "desire lines," especially on the north and south sides to get to 23rd Street make this very clear.

The National Park Service and DDOT want to fix this. Fortunately, instead of using the strategy of just fencing off parks to stop pedestrians, as they wanted to do for the triangle park at Q Street and the Dupont Circle Metro, the Park Service is doing the right thing: they will add walkways and move some.

DDOT will add crosswalks and new signals that line up with the new walkways. After this project, every pedestrian crossing in and out of Washington Circle will have a traffic signal. DDOT also plans more signals and crosswalks on the roads between the circle and Pennsylvania Avenue or K Street, letting pedestrians cross directly in sensible directions.

The plan also calls for a fence around the remainder of the circle. This will stop people from walking in and out at other places.

I'm not very enthusiastic about this recent NPS push for adding more fences. Down the street from Washington Circle, they're proposing another fence, also to "eliminate the creation of social paths," for the triangle between 21st, I, and Pennsylvania NW.

Instead of holding the existing layout sacrosanct, at Washington Circle, they are working to accommodate pedestrians. By placing crosswalks at the main places people want to cross, this traffic circle is about to get a lot safer.

Each design team is charged with coming up with innovative ways to revitalize 3 zones: Constitution Gardens (the area containing the Vietnam Veterans Memorial), the area encompassing the base of the Washington Monument and Sylvan Theater, and Union Square (the Mall's eastern third). The winners of the 8-month competition, now in its final stage, will be announced in a ceremony on May 3. A group of 12 finalists has been selected, 4 for each section.

Three individuals with extensive public space design experience, though not all planners or designers by profession, shared their insights as to what makes a great public space in a January 11 panel talk at the National Archives. They agreed that great spaces must be able to sustain a high level of use over time yet retain the surrounding community's sense of ownership and stewardship.

The challenge at the heart of the treatment of the Mall is that it must be a national symbol, a green space for area residents, and the locus of expressions of the national public mood (celebrations, remembrances, protests) all at the same time. Theaster Gates, a Chicago-based artist and cultural developer, spoke eloquently to this conflict: "America is a very complex place with lots of different people and lots of different interests that would like to see themselves present on the Mall."

An "evolving monument," Gates said, isn't a permanent manifestation of one historical person or event, but rather a constant symbol of the community's mood that is "a carrier of whatever the moment is" and "accumulate[s] multiple stories." Public art or architecture that changes with the times would carry more meaning for people than a statue of, for example, Civil War commander John Logan, whose significance is lost on most who pass through Logan Circle.

The idea of public parks as staging grounds for cultural movements has been tested by the presence of Occupy DC in the city's central public squares. Gates insisted that there is no way to plan a space to accommodate certain types of First Amendment expression, as the very act of planning for them takes away their spontaneity, and thus much of their power.

"No matter how much planning and designing we do, people have the ability to remake spaces," Gates said, as Occupy has done. "Public space has to be able to cradle movements," added Tupper Thomas. "Spaces are defined by how people choose to use them. I don't think you can design niches for resistance," said John Bela.

Three specific precedents for innovations in public parks were discussed: the restoration of Brooklyn's Prospect Park as a popular gathering place, the transformation of Manhattan's High Line from an elevated railroad to a mile-long green space, and the annual observance of Park[ing] Day when on-street parking spaces are turned into temporary parks.

30 years ago, Prospect Park, designed by Frederick Law Olmstead (whose hand is also seen in parts of the Mall, Rock Creek Park, and on Gallaudet University's campus), had become "totally unused" because people were afraid to go on. Tupper Thomas's Prospect Park Alliance engaged in a grassroots dialogue, beginning with door-to-door canvassing, with the goal of getting Brooklynites, some of the country's most diverse citizenry, to love the park again. The park now has more visitors than it can handle, and the Alliance's new challenge is raising enough money to maintain it.

Park[ing] Day mastermind John Bela of San Francisco's Rebar Art and Design Studio spoke to the idea of planning for the sustainability of public spaces as a constantly evolving process. Park[ing] Day relies on a how-to manual with a few guidelines, but beyond that each group can make what they want of it. The most important aspect of the temporary parks, however, is that they have a truly public feel, and are not just extensions of the commercial spaces in front of which many of them are created.

Manhattan's High Line has accelerated the surrounding neighborhood's redevelopment and, because of this, has sparked the interest of other cities seeking to emulate it.

The fact that it took two entrepreneurs to take on the task of remaking the High Line, with initially no help from the city bureaucracy, shows that the traditional planning process is broken, said Bela. Consultants and activists with their own agendas, he noted, too often come to dominate "open" planning processes, essentially drowning out other community voices. To counter this tendency, planners should offer many affected people different levels of engagement in a process to give them more ownership.

It is good that cities are seeking to be noticed for good public spaces, added Gates, but each city should decide what kind of re-use of abandoned urban infrastructure is appropriate to its own context. Thomas cautioned those seeking to emulate the High Line to pay as much attention to community development as to economic development.

"Cities are being determined by what the public realm is," Trust for the National Mall President Caroline Cunningham summarized. In the Mall's case, local residents' desires for a certain type of public realm must be balanced with the nation's need for a place that is "both grand and personal" and evokes the country's history and future, while allowing the people to help shape that future through collective action.

In contrast to Vonier stood Ward, who turned to the Washington Monument as an ideal example of a minimalist solution to security concerns. The Monument received a security facelift in 2003 with the addition of sunken walls that naturally curve around the base of the hill on which the Monument stands, providing additional security without encroaching upon visitors' privacy.

Unlike Vonier, Ward seemed more inclined to respect historical precedents and maintain the natural order of a space to the greatest extent possible. He lamented the 18-foot descent that pedestrians endure when approaching the Capitol Visitor Center, a sensation he described as the antithesis to the entry experience one expects of such a grand building.

Jenkins and Vonier both suggested civic authorities reduce security risks from vehicles by creating pedestrian roadways with reduced or no car and truck access. London developed the "Ring of Steel" after a series of IRA attacks. This is a perimeter of Closed-captioned Television (CCTV), police, and bollards within the City of London, Greater London's financial district. According to Jenkins, as a result of the "Ring of Steel," the streets have been "pedestrianized," and commerce is thriving.

Ward, however, disagreed with adopting a similar approach. "We don't have the density of pedestrians" to eliminate cars from certain roads, he said. Ward also suggested that the economy would not support such changes in traffic patterns, which could "kill businesses."

The panelists bandied about a number of solutions to the question of how to simultaneously provide both security and amenity. Vonier referred to the classic necessity of more eyes on the street to increase vigilance against threats. He suggested that police and civic authorities encourage proprietors to take ownership of the sidewalks and streets in front of their businesses, creating a "defensible space."

During the question and answer session, Jenkins suggested that in order to make the public more accountable for security, governments must improve education and communication, helping individuals to better understand policy decisions and security protocol while empowering them to be more vigilant.

Disappointingly, some of the pricklier subjects, such as congestion pricing, closed circuit surveillance, and defense against airborne security threats were mentioned in brief but not explored much further.

Many questions still remained unanswered. How can design engage the public in the provision of their own security? At what point did Americans become passive potential victims, as many of the latest security measures suggest? Which works better: the prototypical Parisian cafe-style of surveillance, or the large setbacks and empty spaces prevalent in front of federal buildings?

Nobody seemed fully equipped to provide answers, largely because the issue frequently turns into a matter of subjective opinion, as the talks showed. At the very least, however, the panelists could all agree that many existing security features around DC, like the Jersey barriers outside of the Federal Aviation Administration's building, can and should be improved to reflect stronger urban design and a better connection to the pedestrian experience.

Crowdsourcing has evolved into one of many tools in an urban planner's toolkit to seek input on a specific issue that impacts the region. It eliminates much of the legwork associated with gathering public opinion and often reaches a much wider audience than just attending a handful of ANC meetings or holding a public forum could.

The website for "Start in September" features inviting pin-up bulletin board graphics for its visitors, who are entreated upon to describe what would create a "greener, healthier, more livable District." DC, which has already been recognized nationally for boasting the most expansive LEED green building pipeline and the highest bike share participation, could likely gain much from the ideas of its residents who have supported these efforts.

In its current form, "Start in September" resembles a much larger, similar initiative that recently took place in New York City. Prior to the Institute for Urban Design's annual Urban Design Week, the organization launched "By the City / For the City," a crowd sourced initiative to "improve the city's public spaces, systems, and social fabric."

Between June 1st and July 31st of this year, "By the City / For the City" collected more than 500 ideas on topics as wide ranging as urban community gardens to the re-use of highway underpasses and the creation of "graffiti parks" intended purely for urban artists to tag their work freely.

Perusing the list of ideas on the website feels a lot like looking at the ideal metropolis: Combine every contributor's good idea, and you've got a Sim City of sustainable, smart growth perfection.

"Start in September" hasn't yet quite picked up the momentum that the Institute of Urban Design's effort achieved by summer's end, but the District is off to a good start. Already the website has drawn 51 new suggestions, filed under the somewhat vague categories of "Define It" and "Do It," which feature ideas like creating a District Conservation Corps, making city-wide recycling bins larger while making trash cans smaller, and disconnecting all gutters from drains that lead into sewer systems.

Whether because the effort of posting a photograph exceeds just sharing an idea, or because of lower publicity thus far, the NCPC site has only 4 comments thus far. They criticize ugly Jersey barriers at the US Department of Transportation, and praise more artistic bollards in New York's financial district.

Online participation is just one component of public involvement, and both initiatives couple it with other more traditional ways to be involved. NCPC's panel discussion will run from 6:30-8 pm tonight at the US Department of Commerce Auditorium. Enter from 14th Street between Constitution and Pennsylvania. RSVP here.

As for DC's sustainability initiative, "Start in September" is intended to be the first stage in a months-long planning process, and is also intended to spark community discussions on the topic. The site aims to draw the crowdsourcing off of the Internet and into single member district, tenant's association, and other local meetings.

If you're planning on leading, or attending, a community meeting this month, grab a discussion guide from sustainable.dc.gov and crowd source your neighbors. You may be surprised with what you hear.

Other panels will follow, with many great people including Stewart Schwartz of the Coalition for Smarter Growth, Arlington County Board Chairman Chris Zimmerman, DC and Montgomery County planning directors Harriet Tregoning and Rollin Stanley, Councilmember Tommy Wells, and Brookings scholar and author Christopher Leinberger.

Hack Day: Saturday is also the Mobility Lab's Hack Day for coders interested in working on projects that help people better understand their transportation choices or otherwise using open transit data and open geo data to make better tools.

Next week are several interesting forums that explore key issues in our region.

Redefining security (Monday): NCPC is conducting a forum on September 12 about redefining security a decade after 9/11. How can the federal government balance its security needs with the responsibility of creating useful and accessible public spaces?

The forum is 6:30-8 pm at the US Department of Commerce Auditorium, 1401 Constitution Avenue NW (enter through the main doors on 14th Street). RSVP here. And in advance of the forum, NCPC has a page where you can submit examples of great or examplary or abhorrent security facilities in the region.

Maryland transportation funding (Tuesday): This month's Action Committee for Transit meeting, on September 13, will focus on Maryland's transportation funding challenges.

WABA regional stakeholder meetings (Tuesday): WABA also kicks off a series of regional discussions with stakeholders, to set its priorities and lead up to a big November 3 summit. The first one, on September 13, is in Greenbelt, followed in successive weeks by Kensington, Shirlington, Alexandria, DC Ward 7 and Vienna.

Historic preservation plan (Tuesday): DC's historic preservation office is updating their 5-year historic preservation plan, and wants public input. You can read draft goals created by HPO and bring your input.

Park(ing) Day (Friday): Park(ing) Day started as a guerrilla street project to temporarily turn a street parking space into a little park. Efforts to legally bring it to DC encountered ridiculous bureaucracy, but this year Casey Trees is organizing their own little park at New Hampshire and Q, NW from 8 am to 5 pm on September 16.

Go car-free, try transit: The following Friday is Car-Free Day, where people pledge to go car free for the day of September 22. You can sign the pledge even if you already won't use a car that day.

In case you read this blog but haven't tried transit, the entire week is Try Transit Week with its own pledge; a lucky pledger could win a year of free transit or free trips on Amtrak.

And...: Other events next week include book talk on Brooklyn gentrification (Tuesday, $18), and a public meeting on the Virginia Avenue tunnel (Thursday).

Regardless of the final path that future development will take in the neighborhood, all three proposals would deck the CSX rail line to extend Maryland Avenue SW, include some degree of infill development, and vastly improve the connection between Benjamin Banneker Park and the Southwest Waterfront.

Rehabilitation

Under the Rehabilitation proposal, future development of the Ecodistrict would focus on retooling the vastly inefficient 60's and 70's era federal buildings that currently dominate the site. This would primarily involve a vast upgrade of the heating and cooling systems present in many of these buildings, enhancing stormwater management, and increasing on-site electricity production and conservation.

Some of the buildings may also start to incorporate residential and commercial uses in order to enhance the diversity of the neighborhood. While no buildings would be removed under this option, it would cut away the Department of Energy's overhang that currently cuts off views along 10th Street of the Smithsonian Castle to the north.

Furthermore, it would enhance the current network of streets by adding a number of new intersections and enhancing the neighborhood's connectivity.

Redevelopment

The Redevelopment proposal includes many of the elements of Rehabilitation, such as the energy-efficiency and stormwater elements, but it goes a farther in some key respects. Instead of just cutting out the 10th Street overhang, this plan would completly demolish the Department of Energy's James Forrestal building, replacing it with a number of new structures.

The great appeal of this plan is that it will open up brand new views of the Washington Monument from Virginia Avenue SW. The plan also seeks to deck over a portion of I-395 between 10th Street and 9th Street, increasing the number of potential buildings along the corridor and partially removing the unsightly highway from view.

This Redevelopment proposal also goes the farthest to enhance the connectivity of the street grid by breaking up the Department of Energy superblock and adding the greatest number of new intersections to the neighborhood.

Repurpose

NCPC's final proposal is the simplest. It focuses on repurposing several federal buildings to new uses. The buildings with the most potential include the nearby US Postal Services Library, the General Services Administration Building, and the FAA's Orrville Wright Building.

NCPC believes that simply repurposing these buildings and renovating others to more efficiently use their space could yield up to another million square feet of space in which to add neighborhood amenities.

No plan has been set in stone, and any future development will likely include bits and pieces from any or all of these proposals. All seek to enhance the neighborhood by adding new amenities, including restaurants, retail, and cultural destinations that will not only draw new residents to the area but also pull some of the millions of tourists away from the National Mall and towards the cultural amenities of our fair city.

All attempt to make the Ellipse itself more inviting than it is today, as an oval-shaped employee parking lot for the White House complex with a giant desolate lawn in the center. But there's only so much you can do with a big empty oval surrounded by other government buildings and parks that serves little real function outside of White House public events like the national Christmas tree and menorah lightings.

Most create a low concrete wall that doubles as security and also seating for tourists. One, from Sasaki Associates, also suggests a cafe in the west grove just northwest of the Ellipse, but given current Park Service attitudes toward providing food options, it's likely the Ellipse itself will remain a place people primarily pass through in the vain search for anything good to eat within a half mile of the Mall.

The real opportunity to make a positive difference comes at E Street. It used to be a through route between Foggy Bottom and Pennsylvania Avenue downtown. Closed, it has turned into a forbidding and ugly fortress that looks more in place in Baghdad than Washington. It could at least work more like its counterpart on the north side, Pennsylvania Avenue, as a wide and attractive public space where people can observe the White House, protest, and still use as a through route for walking or bicycling.

Some of the designs embrace opportunities to activate E Street, while others think little beyond the current heavy iron gate look of the place. The less imaginative, like the one from Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, keeps the ends largely as they are, with big vehicle gates and guardhouses right by the intersection, small pedestrian gates on the sidewalk, and fences in between:

Others, like Sasaki's and the one from Reed Hilderbrand move the screening away from the center of the roadway and thereby deemphasize them. Reed Hilderbrand's approach moves this to the northern edge of the roadway on either end, leaving the remainder as a bollard-ringed shared area that looks similar to Pennsylvania Avenue.

Sasaki's proposal appears to move buildings for screening vehicles around to the perpendicular East and West Executive Avenues, letting official vehicles queue on more of E Street before reaching the checkpoints. This would have the benefit of reducing the amount of time the line spills over onto 15th and 17th Streets, blocking the road, sidewalk and/or bike lanes.

In the center, where people can view the White House, most designs try to better link the Ellipse visually to the South Lawn. Several create a large central plaza that forms a break in the lines of planted shrubs and where the distinctions between sidewalk and roadway disappear. Walkways from different angles all converge on this focal point which also includes the Zero Milestone marker.

To increase space for a plaza, some proposals reduce the vehicular orientation of the Ellipse. Two proposals, from Rogers Marvel Architects and Reed Hilderbrand, suggest removing parking from the northern half of the Ellipse and instead having a vehicular roadway entering from the northwest, looping around the south half of the Ellipse, and exiting in the northeast.

Taking an opposite tack, Michael Van Valkenburgh keeps all of the parking and designs a place to create a future underground parking garage.

As for bicycles, it's clear some designers were keeping bikes in mind while others were not at all.

Sasaki specifically labels bike lanes on E Street, and Hood Design Studio's submission shows flow for each mode of travel including through routes for bikes. Meanwhile, the proposal from Rogers Marvel Architects has an attractively laid out set of pedestrian pathways but absolutely no mention of bikes.

All proposals fill their renderings with stock images of people running, walking, standing and otherwise using the spaces. Three, the Sasaki, Reed Hilderbrand, and Hood designs, include people biking through, and sometimes rollerblading as well. The Rogers Marvel Architects and Michael Van Valkenburgh proposals, ironically the two from New York, include no images of cyclists (except one on the RMA rendering shown above, with a man in a suit on something the size of a kid's bike a folding bike gazing at the White House).

NCPC will be exhibiting all five designs at the White House Visitor Center at 1450 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW today until Monday, June 27. All groups will present designs live on Tuesday, June 28, and a task force from various agencies will choose a winner by June 30.

You can also view the submissions online and send your comments to NCPC.

On Tuesday, June 7, NCPC will host a panel discussion as part of their Contemporary Design, Historic City series. Titled The Balancing Act Between Innovation & Preservation, the talk will examine how contemporary architecture can coexist with DC's historic characteristics. The event will be held at Catholic University, and though it's free and open to the public, RSVP is encouraged.

Finally, WABA's major summer fundraiser, BikeFest, is Saturday, June 11th, from 8 pm to midnight in Crystal City. Besides the "carnival-cycle games, a silent auction and raffle, sideshow performances, live music and dancing ... palm readings, photobooth and much more," three area bike shops will compete to create custom bicycles using low-cost, recycled materials.

You can get more information about these and other events on the Greater Greater Washington calendar.