February 12, 2026 PC Urban Development & Placemaking Committees - Feb 12, 2026

meeting

Fairfax County Planning Commission 1h 23m 6 speakers 8 agenda items transcribed 7 days ago official recording ↗

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What were the opening approvals and agenda for the February 12 Urban Development & Placemaking Committee meeting?

Unknown 0:00

Okay,

John A. Carter 0:07

so we should get started so this is the urban development and placemaking committee we've got a couple things to do Right off the bat is approval of our September 2025 minutes

Unknown 0:21

All

John A. Carter 0:24

right, I think it's unanimous So we're going to do it a little bit different. We're going to do it all by our lonesome. We're not going to have the staff here. I'm sure you'll be disappointed. There's no PowerPoint. But the information is on the website. So anyone following from home, you can go to the website as we talk. And I've printed brochures. And as you know, for placemaking, our focus has been on streets and open spaces so this committee we started out with a what I thought was very successful work session we had over 40 people that came was facilitated by some professors from Florida What we did was we had six tables and three examples. The examples included the following. A place in Tyson's near the Greensboro Metro Station.

John A. Carter 1:36

And the exercise was to come up with a system of streets, to come up with open spaces and see if you can make it work in real time. So two tables did that. At the same time, we had two tables working on what I call a merging center in the Mount Vernon corridor. And it did the same thing using the local parameters uh streets and open spaces and networks that would connect it together and then the third table was an a older commercial center of which we have many in fairfax but just as an example we took annandale so how could you complete the existing street system how could you have some better open spaces for public gathering and make the streets work I would say it was very successful. There was a printout.

John A. Carter 2:32

There is a report out on that. There's a video out on that. There's two AI examples that I thought were pretty good. If you ever get a chance to look at those, that was a pretty good example. Now, when that happens, at the beginning of it, we talked about, well, what is placemaking when it refers to streets and open spaces? And we used A couple of Fairfax, a few Fairfax examples, Reston Town Center, the Mosaic, Fairfax Corner, and maybe the Borough as examples of placemaking. So we completed that. So what have we done since then? We had presentations of the staff on the design guidelines for Volume 1, which has to do with all of the list of activity centers in Fairfax. Over 100 pages. Well done. Very comprehensive.

John A. Carter 3:33

And that's what we've done so far. Now, what I've done is designed a couple of pamphlets, one for each streets and open spaces. The point was to make them certainly graphically interesting. So you might actually pick them up and look at them. But the staff refers them as checklists. And I think they could be used that way. You could add or subtract things from the list, and I'm going to go over them in a minute. Or you could not use them at all, I guess. But what's happened lately, and I'd like to highlight some of the projects that we've done at the Commission during the last year or so. One of my favorites was the Judicial Center in Fairfax. And in that center, the staff is focusing on this issue. So you saw a new system of streets.

John A. Carter 4:30

Of course, it's in the city of Fairfax. So the city of Fairfax has a little more flexibility than we do. They created a pilot program for streetlights. The crosswalks were all done the way you should be doing them to meet the ADA standards. They paved some of the crosswalks. And of course, it's a historic site, at least a portion of it, the old courthouse. And the open space is good. So I thought that was one of our better examples that followed the work session. The next one that comes to mind, and there are others. One, I believe it's in the Scotts Run area. It had a variety of open spaces. It had a large rectangular field to it and a fair amount of density around it. But you could see there was a real place being created there.

John A. Carter 5:24

I'm not sure what the status of it in terms of construction quite yet. It'll be a while, I'm sure. They also had smaller spaces, and it was all connected by a system of streets. The streets were done what I would think would be the right way, the right crosswalks, the right attention to the details of the streets that I'm going to go over in a minute.