One rainy afternoon in August, Michael Caplin stopped his car in an empty, beat-up asphalt lot and swept his hand across the scene. “Here we are,” he said. “This is Town Square!” In actuality, it was a dormant 10‑acre construction site in the shadow of Tysons Corner Station, an elevated stop on the new Silver Line, a long-awaited expansion that draws the Washington, D.C., Metro system deep into the suburbs of Fairfax County, Virginia. But Michael Caplin doesn’t see actualities in Tysons, only eventualities. So he got the site developer, Lerner Enterprises, to let him host a series of festivals here. And he arranged for nearby building owners to light their roofs so as to create some semblance of a skyline. And he wrapped the droopy fence surrounding the site in a banner that read Town Square, just so no one could mistake it for an empty, beat-up asphalt lot. Now, if he could only get someone to put up the money to repave it.

“I’m saying, ‘Listen, this is key to the vitalization of this region, and it has to look good!,’ ” Caplin said. “So when people come, they come back.”

Getting people to come back is precisely the challenge facing Tysons. This part of Northern Virginia was a rural afterthought until 1968, when Ted Lerner opened a mega-mall called Tysons Corner Center. Named for a crossroads, Tysons Corner quickly matured into one of America’s largest employment hubs (today it hosts Freddie Mac, Capital One, Gannett and USA Today, and Northrop Grumman, among many others). It also came to epitomize the sprawling, car-dependent suburban business parks that popped up around so many U.S. metro areas in the late 20th century, and that were profiled in Joel Garreau’s 1991 book, Edge City.

Now the D.C. outpost famous for its shopping and infamous for its traffic is in the early stages of yet another transformation: “from an ‘edge city’ into a true urban downtown,” in the words of a comprehensive development plan adopted in 2010 by Fairfax County. Come 2050, Tysons—its Corner a recent casualty of rebranding—hopes to be home to 100,000 residents (up from nearly 20,000 today) and 200,000 jobs. The county’s plan authorized 45 million square feet of new development, provided the growth is anchored around new Metro stations (four of the five Silver Line stations that opened earlier this year are in Tysons). Increased density and expanded rail access, combined with a push for walking, cycling, and bus ridership, are supposed to render driving entirely optional.

Officially, Caplin heads the Tysons Partnership, a coalition of local businesses and citizens tasked with supporting the shift from suburb to city. Unofficially, his role is to infuse a land of shopping malls and auto dealerships with some cultural identity. “So you’ve got a fabulous building you’re putting up over there, and I’ve got a fabulous building over here, but in between is 12 lanes of asphalt or something,” he told me earlier that day in his office, a 10-minute walk (on brand-new sidewalks) from Tysons Corner Station. “So I go around connecting the dots among people and suggesting things we might do together for the common good.”

Which is how one empty lot became Town Square. And how another became the temporary home of a Sunday farmers’ market. And how still another is supposed to become a pop-up park that will host jazz concerts on Thursday evenings. And how shipping containers will, with any luck, become an instant retail village in the barren area near the new Greensboro Station. “It’s all part of the expanding narrative: ‘There’s a lot going on in Tysons,’ ” Caplin said. His efforts are meant to contend with a conundrum: urban social scenes don’t emerge without bright young residents, but bright young residents don’t move to a city without a social scene. “Nobody ever said ‘Let’s go to a party in Tysons,’ ” he pointed out. “They said ‘Avoid the traffic.’ ”

Caplin can remember a time when Tysons was little more than an intersection with a general store. He was 10 when his family moved from Charlottesville to Washington so his father could join the Kennedy administration as the IRS commissioner (Time magazine put him on a 1963 cover as “Tax Collector Mortimer Caplin”). The young Caplin watched close-up as Tysons evolved from hinterland to quintessential edge city. Now Caplin hopes Tysons can again lead the country, this time by transforming itself from a sprawling suburb to a walkable town center. “If it works,” he told me, “it could be a solution for a lot of places around the world that have the exact same challenge.” In fact, a few places have already made this urbanist leap—most notably, Lakewood, Colorado—but none have done so on this scale. Christopher Leinberger, a development scholar, has said that if urbanization succeeds in Tysons, it can succeed anywhere in the world.