Central Kenilworth Avenue Revitalization Study

In the 1950s and 60s, Prince George's County experienced a boom of commercial development and strip shopping centers.  Unfortunately, these centers are aging and do not meet the current shopping needs of their surrounding communities, nor do these corridors meet the desire to have walkable communities and increased transit options.  Additionally, many of these commercial corridors cross multi-jurisdictional boundaries, further complicating redevelopment efforts.

As a model of how the County's aging, suburban shopping areas can be redeveloped, NDC's Prince George's County office has been conducting a year-long planning initiative along Kenilworth Avenue - known as the Central Kenilworth Avenue Revitalization Project (CKAR).  The project began when the unincorporated community of Templeton Knolls (which borders this commercial corridor) asked the Neighborhood Design Center (NDC), the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission's Community Planning Division, and the Town of Riverdale Park to implement a collaborative community planning process in an effort to strategically deal with some pressing issues along Kenilworth Avenue, between River Road (north of East West Highway) and Edmonston Road (south of East-West Highway).  M-NCPPC served as the lead agency for the project, with NDC staff helping to facilitate the process by conducting interviews and workshops, collecting information, and developing planning and design recommendations.

This particular strip of Kenilworth Avenue was annexed by the Town of Riverdale Park, which lies to the west of the highway.  Additionally, the Maryland State Highway Administration recently invested several million dollars in improvements to the streetscape, which included a new median strip with raised planters.  Unfortunately, the adjacent commercial area has deteriorated badly over the last few years.  Facades of businesses are in need of refurbishment; the pedestrian environment lacks street furniture and appropriately-scaled lighting (below), and crime has been on the increase.  Templeton Knolls (situated to the east of Kenilworth Avenue) is the community that is most adversely affected by these developments.  However, because the commercial strip is within the jurisdiction of Riverdale Park, the residents feel they have little control over the deterioration and lack of enforcement or improvement.
Planning for the revitalization of the Kenilworth corridor was a challenge because the process involved bringing together Town, State, Metropolitan Washington, and County agencies to collaboratively address issues that had been identified by the community.  This was where NDC played a key role.  Drawing on our experience in community planning, staff interviewed key stakeholders in order to get their commitment and participation in the process.  Six focus groups were convened to address Streetscape, Code Enforcement, Crime, Business and Economic Development, Neighborhood Issues, and problems affecting some major apartment complexes.  Eighty people attended an initial Community Workshop, which addressed all the identified issues and brainstormed solutions to them.


NDC was also able to leverage a partnership with the Landscape Architecture Program at the University of Maryland, College Park.  The senior class devoted their community Design Studio to the CKAR project.  They conducted two additional community workshops with teenagers and young adults.  The landscape architecture students used the information gathered in the various workshops to develop a number of design proposals addressing streetscape, transit-oriented development, the redevelopment of two shopping centers, and improved community open space.  The students designs were presented at a second community-wide workshop in May 2008. 


(To see other examples of the students' work, and to download their studio report, click here).

The final step of the project was the creation of a Report and Action Plan. The action plan is currently being implemented by the CKAR Steering Committee - a coalition of government officers, elected officials, and civic leaders.  All parties involved believe that it was a successful process (so far almost $50,000 of in-kind services has been secured) and there is hope that this pilot project will be a model in Prince George's County for addressing complex planning problems where cross-jurisdictional issues occur!