JOSH: Columbia is the result of James Rouse, a visionary American developer.

He grew up on the Eastern Shore and spent much of his life trying to recreate that community.

He had three goals for Columbia.

The first was to respect the land, and that meant not building in the most sensitive areas, and then tying all those green spaces that were preserved into the community.

The second goal was to create a place for the growth of people that have all the aspects of life within walking distance.

And then the third goal was to create an actual city.

Uh, so not just a bedroom community, but a place with jobs and shopping, et cetera.

The very basic unit of Columbia is a neighborhood, and a neighborhood, more or less supports an elementary school.

And then the neighborhoods cluster together to form a village.

And the village is large enough to support a middle school and high school and a grocery store.

And then all the villages together, of which there are 10, support Columbia, the whole town.

But Rouse wanted town homes and rental apartments, even high rises in the suburbs so that everyone with every economic background and every living style could find a place in Columbia.

The big grandiose plan has a lot of smaller idiosyncrasies.

So one is gang mailboxes.

He wanted to set the mailboxes up in a cluster so that you would have to go and interact with your neighbors as you were getting your mail.

Another thing that was important to Rouse was racial integration, which was very pioneering for its time.

He wanted Columbia to be a completely open community.

And in fact, today the percentage of different backgrounds, different ethnicities, different races in Columbia, reflects America at large, which is very rare.

SHIRLEY: My name is Shirley Harden, and I've lived in Columbia for 49 years.

I had just been divorced and I wanted a fresh start.

We'd seen advertisements in the paper.

They talked about the different ways you could live here in Columbia, apartments and townhouses.

I hadn't seen anything like that.

We had a good school, we had a diverse community, even something as simple as going to church.

The Interfaith Center was an amazing new concept for us.

And here we had one building where all the faiths were worshiping.

SPEAKER: God, we thank you so much for the gift of today.

SHIRLEY: I believe that Jim Rouse's dreams are true in so many ways, and I think that some of them are fading.

What's neat is the young people are trying to make them come alive again.

And one of those people happens to be my daughter.

LAURA: I think Rouse's Vision was founded in community, and I realized that women of color entrepreneurs had no resources to support their businesses, no resources to support their business education.

The Third is a nonprofit that is based here in Howard County.

We serve women of color entrepreneurs.

And then what we're sitting in right now is The Third Space, which is our community co-working and café space.

So the idea is that this is a very women of color focused and centric space that's open to everyone, inviting the community in to maybe be in a space where they've never been in before, where they're not centered, but welcome.

I think James Rouse's vision is something that can be communicated past an Interfaith Center, past a mailbox.

It's really a feeling of being at home and feeling like you belong somewhere.