Tysons Corner isn’t much to look at. I don’t mean simply that it’s unattractive — although it is — but that when you pass through it, along the main commercial strip of Route 7, in Northern Virginia’s Fairfax County, you don’t even get the feeling that anything substantial is there. You see a long, loose string of office buildings built in the 1970s and ’80s, scattered over a stretch of two or three miles, few of them close together or in any way congruent with each other. You pass two huge regional shopping malls, both tucked behind vast parking lots and barely visible from the highway. You don’t know for sure when you’ve reached the place, and there’s no way to tell when you’ve left.
If you work in local government anywhere, the odds are you have heard the joke that there are two things Americans can’t stand: sprawl and density. I refer to it as a joke, but in fact it comes close to being a literal truth. Millions of Americans who live in places like Fairfax County visit places such as Boston and San Francisco and wish they could recreate some of that urbanity and elegance for themselves. But faced with the reality of what true urban sophistication requires — height, big crowds, and strangers from the city flocking in on trains, they back off. That’s the deadlock of density.
The developer of this project, the Macerich Co. of California, is pressing all the right New Urbanist buttons. Its computerized graphics envision spacious plazas, sculpture gardens, skating rinks and performance space. Macerich talks about making the Intersection of Routes 7 and 123 into a new “Central Park,” a “100 percent downtown corner.”
Most intriguing of all, Macerich is promising to take the blank acres of asphalt that dominate Tysons now and superimpose a grid that would provide 54 additional pedestrian-friendly streets for traffic to move in, generate a huge increase in sidewalk capacity, provide up to 14,000 curbside parking spaces, and in the end create something that doesn’t just possess the density of a city but actually looks like a city.
My guess is that when all of this development is completed, 10 or 15 years from now, I do not expect that Tysons Corner will much resemble the green pedestrian oasis pictured in the computerized Macerich sketches. But I think it will be quite a bit better than what is there now. I also think it will be a commercial success.
I’m convinced of that because I see all around me a generation of young, mainstream, middle-class adults — label them any way you want to — who are looking for some form of mid-level urban experience, not bohemian inner-city adventure but definitely not cul-de-sacs and long commutes. There are more of them coming into the residential market every year. They like the idea of having some space, but they aren’t fleeing in terror at the mention of density. They aren’t willing to sell their cars, but they appreciate the advantage of having another way to get around. If Tysons Corner is rebuilt on a reasonable human scale and with a modicum of physical appeal, they will go for it, imperfect as it may be.
And then we will begin to see experiments of this sort in suburbs all over the country, launched by developers and local governments that may still be a little nervous about density but will know one thing for sure: If Tysons Corner can be reborn, nothing in the suburbs is beyond hope.If the effort to rebuild Tysons Corner somehow succeeds, it will become a national model for reclaiming suburbia.
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