Alexander Garvin said he had first heard of Reston when he was studying at Yale, where Bob Simon came to a seminar and spoke about his effort to start the planned community in Northern Virginia. "It became an inspiration for developers all around the country," Garvin said.

On Saturday afternoon, April 10, the urban planner, author and educator was the guest speaker for the community’s seventh annual Founder’s Day, celebrating Reston’s 46th anniversary and Simon’s 96th birthday.

At the time of Reston’s founding, a lot of other ideas were floating around about how to design planned communities, Garvin told the 100 or so people gathered in the Reston Community Center at Lake Anne. The neighborhood of Radburn, N.J. had opened decades earlier, in 1928 as a "new town for the motor age," he said, noting that Simon’s father had been an investor in the project. The community featured rows of cul de sacs facing "green spines," as well as a pedestrian system including underpasses. "I think that’s an important influence on Reston," Garvin said, adding that Reston had 39 underpasses and was built around green "sinews."

He said Reston would go on to set new examples for suburban development. One of them was Lake Anne. "A lake-centered development was not a common thing when Reston began in the 1960s," Garvin said. "It’s become a huge influence." He said Columbia, Md., Irvine, Calif., Woodlands, Texas and other communities had borrowed the idea of building around manmade lakes.

AS A MEASURE of Reston’s success, Garvin said he had looked up Simon’s original seven goals for the community and determined that at least six of them had been achieved. For example, he said, the proportion of single-family, detached homes was considerably lower than average. "That’s a good deal greater variety of housing types than you would find in a conventional suburb of the United States." As for the opportunity to live and work in the same community, he said 42 percent of the jobs in Reston were held by Reston residents. "That’s an enormous number," he said.

The one goal whose achievement was in question, Gavin said, was the community’s financial success. He noted that the Tall Oaks supermarket was again vacant, businesses were foundering at Lake Anne Plaza and the community center where he was speaking had once been a supermarket. Garvin said the business of retail had changed since Reston’s formation, with supermarkets looking for larger spaces and businesses able to sell online.

The only solution, he said, was to bring more people, "because without more customers, these stores are not going to survive." He urged the community to find sites that could be developed and to make it simple for developers to build there. "Second growth in suburban areas is something we’ve done little of in the United States because we’re a young country. But we’re going to have to," Garvin said.

Asked to comment on the challenges and opportunities presented by the coming of Metrorail, he recalled that Reston had been difficult to access, with no exit from the toll road, when he first visited, and this had made it harder to convince people to move there. "Let me assure you, the ability to get on mass transit and go where you want to is a huge thing," he said. Now, he said, more people would be willing to move to the area, and places would need to be found to locate them. He suggested the existing village centers and the areas around Metro stops.

Resident and Planning Commissioner Walter Alcorn (At-large) asked how the plan for Lake Anne redevelopment that was completed last year could be pitched to developers, and Garvin said it was difficult to market a community but that developers would come after the economy rebounded if the site was affordable. "You have to set it up so when the market changes, there are sites that are accessible by price and it’s easy to build them," he said.

ASKED about the possibility of placing a satellite center for a university at Lake Anne, Garvin said residents didn’t know whether a university was interested in moving there. "I don’t believe in going to the community, putting up a blank sheet of paper and saying, ‘What do you want?’" he said. "When I come to a community meeting, I list the things that are possible and what is the cost to the community."

Mary Ellen Craig wanted to know how Reston Town Center, where she lived, could handle an expected boom in population. Garvin suggested the creation of more parkland, which he acknowledged would cost money. He also said the town center, in contrast to most of the country, seemed to have abundant night life but little life during the day, and he said daytime attractions would help. "That 24-hour use of streets would make a huge difference." And he said there were few children in the town center. To bring more children, he said, a "truly great school" with a specialization in a subject like computers and media could be considered. "There would be people from all over the country who would want to send their children there."

Supervisor Cathy Hudgins (D-Hunter Mill) asked whether public-private partnerships, authorities or business improvement districts might help the community get what it needed out of redevelopment projects. Garvin said he favored business improvement districts, where a local tax could be used to sell bonds in order to buy streetlights, wayfinding signs and other improvements, but he said such districts required strong, entrepreneurial leadership. "There are a lot of things you can do, but it has to be something that is in tune with this community," he said.

Following the talk, the crowd moved to the plaza in front of the Reston Museum, where Simon cut the first piece from a towering birthday cake topped with his trademark beret.