White Flint Better Block

2018

In mid-October, we created Montgomery County’s first pop-up park in partnership with Montgomery County Planning, Montgomery County Parks, the Randolph Civic Association, and Allen Krondstadt Realty.

Approximately six months of design and planning culminated in a community built, public, green space in an underutilized grassy lot in the Randolph Hills Shopping Center. During the surveying process, residents overwhelmingly responded with requests for a community green space. However, it was pointed out during our site design discussions that there is an existing green space on the property, but it is just underutilized.

We designed our pop-up park to create a welcome for the neighborhood residents. We wanted to encourage and support the Randolph Hills community members to work with the property owner to take ownership of the space. For the design of our park, we created two sections connected with a street mural across the driveway. The grassy area was designed based on the tenets of traditional German beer gardens. We filled the space with our Wikiblock long tables, rows of trees donated by the Parks Department, and lined the site with local vendors. We hung string lights at 12-feet to create an artificial ceiling at human scale. Fire pits and swing sets were built to provide people an area to congregate. These elements helped to create a relaxed, casual, human-scaled atmosphere on the previously empty space.

VIEW VIDEO: https://youtu.be/auVWQK53KOc?t=5
READ ARTICLE: https://www.betterblock.org/post/parking-lots-to-places