This book treats Northern Virginia—not just DC—as a global capital

There’s an imbalance in how authors write about our region. Washington, DC, is the subject of volume after volume, from academic history to crime novels to literary fiction and more—not to mention the endless exposés of political Washington.

But residents of our region’s other jurisdictions outnumber Washingtonians nearly 10 to one. Where are the books about the people and places elsewhere in our region?

One such non-DC-centered book was published in 2013 by the scholar Andrew Friedman. “Covert Capital: Landscapes of Denial and the Making of U.S. Empire in the Suburbs of Northern Virginia” stands out as a serious application of academic history and landscape studies about the Dulles Corridor. It just may be the first 21st-century attempt to mold a critical perspective on Northern Virginia.

The book is light on urbanism, and it takes a strong political stance, but “Covert Capital” offers a necessary perspective in forming a nuanced understanding of one of our country’s most interesting landscapes.

The book is built on Friedman’s understanding that “there is no American place that’s not also a global place.” He establishes a dichotomy between the “Overt Capital” of Washington, where the Capitol dome represents the public sphere, and the “Covert Capital” of the Dulles Corridor, where the CIA and Pentagon manage their operations in relative privacy. As Friedman examines how foreign policy and foreign interventions shaped the domestic landscape, he locates the cross-border flows of material and people that have made our region what it is today.

It all starts with the Pentagon and the CIA

For Friedman, the history of the Dulles Corridor begins with the construction of the Pentagon in the 1940s, followed a decade later by the CIA headquarters. These buildings took advantage of car-oriented development to gain a new kind of hiddenness, obscured behind forests and parking lots. A drive through Langley can reveal nothing about what takes place behind the agency’s doors.

Nor does a drive through the neighborhoods of McLean reveal much about the lives of its employees. For Friedman, these “landscapes of denial” enabled the CIA to appear as an institution of democracy domestically, even as it overthrew democratic governments abroad.

But not only did the landscape affect the work of the CIA, the work of the CIA also affected the landscape. “CIA covert wars populated the landscape with residents,” Friedman told me. Refugees, collaborators, and ordinary people were brought from other continents to start new lives as Virginians. They built places like the Eden Center, where the South Vietnamese flag still today flies above the parking lot.

A deep dive into Tysons

It is a strange legacy of the CIA that Northern Virginia has become much more ethnically diverse than the District. When I recently got a chance to speak to Friedman about his book, our conversation focused especially on Tysons.

I commented on the plethora of languages I hear every time I walk through Tysons Corner Center. “US empire has been polyglot since the beginning,” he told me. “This mix of languages isn’t a new development, but a making-public of the belonging of migrants to this imperial home front in Tysons.”

Friedman sees the seven years since his book was published as the beginning of a “third generation” in the development of the Dulles Corridor. It’s no longer characterized by leisurely semi-rural landscapes nor by McMansions, but by “lifestyle centers” and “placemaking,” as in the Mosaic District or The Boro. These centers, Friedman says, are in danger of becoming “fortified cells… reinventing the ‘urban’ into subdivisions, compartmentalized, buy-in-based.” Rather than creating an inclusive environment, he worries that lifestyle centers will only create a new form of “landscapes of denial.”

Friedman remains pessimistic about new developments, especially in terms of social equity. He fears that information technology will increase, rather than break down, barriers of denial. He is worried about how Tysons will “reckon with laboring classes,” especially people of color. And he is concerned about what the very idea of “urban” will come to mean in a city without public monuments, houses of worship, or publicly owned plazas.

“Covert Capital” has mostly been well received. The only really critical review I could find was published by the CIA itself. Still, some of Friedman’s arguments may prompt doubt. Did Virginia’s “history of segregation and the Confederacy [that] had equipped the landscape with a habit of division” really lead US agents to propagate such division in the Global South countries where they operated? It is a book that takes a strong stance, one that may seem extreme to some readers.

Though Friedman delves deeply into culture, critically examining common ideas about people of the suburbs.

I found “Covert Capital” not only engaging but critically informative to my own developing understanding of the nature of our region. I recommend the book to all those with a taste for critical theory and an interest in the deeper forces that shape Greater Washington.