Northern Virginia Is a Real Place, Revisited
Feeling at home in a big, anonymous place
A few years ago, when I was still forming my “angle” and approach to urbanism, I wrote a piece called “Northern Virginia is a Real Place.” It was inspired partly by my habit of taking long drives and looking closely at whatever I was passing by. Partly it was also inspired by an article from another Northern Virginian who wrote, basically, that there was no real culture or place here. He implied, sort of, that we have too many immigrants, or that we’re too cosmopolitan—that our culture is a mile wide and an inch deep.
Maybe it feels that way to someone who comes from a rural or a small-town setting, where there are fewer people, and more people know each other, and more people have more things in common (there’s good and bad in that, as there is in everything).
I have myself sometimes written, as I did here for example, about how much of this landscape is spread-out and centerless. I don’t just mean that it’s suburban sprawl. I mean that because there are no real central urban areas, no “hubs,” there’s no immediate place to which you sort of “belong,” where you can go and shop and chat and stroll and be a little bit of a known character and know some of the others. That “hub” function is how the old network of small towns in central Jersey worked for me: giving a kind of skeleton structure to the sprawl areas in between.
But maybe this is the wrong way to think about it. I do miss that coziness and that slight sense of self-importance you can cultivate in a small-town environment. But a place like the D.C. area, or most subsets of it, is completely different. It’s spread out, but it’s also quite densely populated. It’s so full of things that it’s easy to miss most of it. It’s easy to feel abstracted from it all. It is difficult to find the right scale at which to experience this landscape. A car is too fast, transit is impractical, walking is near impossible. A slow, observant drive is the best.
When I’m out driving around the old commercial corridors—U.S. 50 from Fairfax to Arlington, U.S. 1 from Alexandria to Woodbridge—I feel a great sense of belonging and pride. When I see a jumbo jet descending through the air, peeking out from behind the mid-rise office buildings, possibly a million people looking up, worlds being connected—I feel at home.
The other weekend my wife and I stopped at a Peruvian chicken joint for lunch. They’re all pretty similar. Quarter, half, or whole chicken; green and/or white sauce; potatoes, yucca, fries, rice, beans. Maybe burritos or pupusas or some other Latin American items to widen out the menu (but the star is always the chicken). Tray, paper plate, plastic utensils.
It seems so unremarkable that you can eat at a place like this a million times and never really think about what it means. But I know, because we visited Peru in 2024, that this is pretty much exactly what a Peruvian chicken shop in Peru is like. There’s basically no Americanization going on here.
At its most basic, this is a story about immigration. Sometimes, people will find this vaguely objectifying: Oh, you just like immigrants because they bring great food. But I don’t think it is. Of course, immigrants don’t bring their food out of the kindness of their hearts. It’s a business they find themselves able to do. But food is culture. Food is hospitality. Food is almost sacred. Take this, all of you, and eat of it. To break bread with people is in some respect to become one with them.
We should feel proud and, I think, be in awe that we live in a country where people from so many different places want to come; where they can settle and live together and take at least a little part in each other’s cultures and lives. It is slightly miraculous. It is a beautiful, fragile thing. And it is repeated, hundreds and thousands of times, in every little strip mall on every traffic-choked highway across this great big region.
It makes me think of “entertaining angels unawares.” It makes me think of that Last Judgment scene in the Gospel of Matthew, in which the wicked people balk, “Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to you?” There is a consciousness and perception you must work to cultivate, to see not what you see, but what it signifies; what, on some deeper level, it really is.
Urbanism is not reducible to buildings. Perhaps it is not reducible to any one thing, but it is about people more than anything else. About people working together, doing commerce together, living together, and yes, putting up with each other. And wherever we do those things, we are building “real places.”
Related Reading:
Don’t Patch The Hole In The Wall
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I always found Northern Virginia to have more "placeness" than people give it credit for, though I think this is partly because I grew up in Plano, TX which, like all of suburban Dallas, is an even more generic stripmalls-and-mcmansions landscape. So often people assume that the soulless, generic development pattern means soulless, generic culture and it's not true!
Like in Northern Virginia, there are large immigrant communities who've made the place home. In high school, half my classmates were South or East Asian. You can get a great meal walking into any random Indian or Chinese stripmall restaurant. For some reason I torment myself by replying to people on reddit threads who warn against moving to Dallas because "it's generic and there's no good food" - people online don't like hearing it, but it isn't what it looks like.