Suburban Nation
by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Jeff Speck
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Just when you thought you had heard enough empty anti-sprawl rhetoric, along comes "Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream." The book is the latest from Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, the current dark-horse darlings of the urban planning world whose organization — the Congress for the New Urbanism — has turned the anti-sprawl movement into somewhat of a cult.

They are also the designers behind the too-cute-by-half resort-cum-town of Seaside, Fla. and a handful of other so-called "neotraditional new towns" around the country (Seaside was praised by Prince Charles as the future of urban planning, even though it's located in the wilderness of the Florida panhandle). In many ways, the book reflects the sort of saccharine feeling one gets when visiting a place like Seaside — a bit too neat and tidy, a bit too simple, a general feeling that the world you have entered in no way reflects reality.

"Suburban Nation," to its credit, is not just another anti-sprawl diatribe, the kind of book that in its zealous litany of facts, figures and arcane history is about as exciting to read as the back of a condom box, consequentially receiving about as much attention. Instead, the book centers itself on the failure of planners and architects to maintain the link between policy, design and aesthetics that underlies traditional neighborhoods and towns like Georgetown, Coral Gables, Fla. and Beacon Hill. And it is the last part — aesthetics — that is the focus of the majority of "Suburban Nation's" attention.

Indeed, one of the more pleasant aspects of "Suburban Nation" is its relative lack of statistics. Most of the statistics that do appear in the book go to prove that Americans do not want sprawl, favor old neighborhoods over new subdivisions, want more public transit instead of more lanes of highway and generally pine for the "good old days" of tree-lined streets and corner markets. If this is the case, the authors ask, why does sprawl keep getting built?

The answer lies in the rise of the modernist aesthetic of post-war architecture and planning. Urban planners, well-versed in sophisticated statistical and modeling techniques developed during the war, got together with architects who had spent too much time reading Le Corbusier and too little time learning about human nature, and the two groups began in earnest to design entire cities based on things like "drive-hours" and "turn-radii." What they failed to take into account, argue the authors, is what people might actually feel about all this. As a result, we are stuck in a world where the ever-increasing rate of sprawl threatens our environment, our health and, most importantly, our general sense of community.

The book is also significant in its application of another movement that has been gaining momentum over the last decade, the so-called Return to Modernism (alternately called the "what do we do now that all that Postmodernism B.S. is over?" movement). The idea is that Postmodernism, far from being the next logical step in social development, is really just the mutant child of over-eager modernist sensibilities and commodified avant-garde kitsch.

Essentially, the authors see the last 50 years of urban planning as an aberration in the development of American cities. Whereas turn-of-the-century planning trends such as the City Beautiful movement and the Progressive Era produced some of the most beloved and architecturally sound urban landscapes, post-war planning, with its emphasis on rational, statistics-driven designs, lost sight of both the humanistic and aesthetic notions central to its forebears, and began building hundreds of square miles of franchised, poorly designed schlock, whether it be housing, shopping or even street design — what has collectively come to be called Postmodern society. The implication, of course, is not that we need a post-Postmodernism, but rather a return to the critical humanist values of Modernism circa 1920-1930.

This is not a new idea — literary theorist, social critic and all-around smart guy Frederic Jameson made a similar (albeit much more general) social critique in his landmark "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" in 1991. But Duany and Plater-Zyberk are among the first to apply it to urban planning, and that fact alone makes "Suburban Nation" a noteworthy book.

Not surprisingly, as a solution to sprawl, the authors advocate a return to the planning styles of the early Modernists, combined with the technologies and skills of today, something they call neotraditionalism.

They compare their approach to a Mazda Miata, "a car that looks, sounds, and handles like a British roadster but maintains the rate-of-repair record of a Honda Civic." What this means in policy terms (and is laid out list-style at the back of the book) is an emphasis on mixed-use buildings, a focus on breeding small, walkable neighborhoods, improved mass transit, and an architecture that appeals both to the needs of 21st-century society as well as the typical American's traditional sensibilities.

And this is good. But one of the problems with "Suburban Nation," as with so much of the anti-sprawl movement, is that it has convinced itself that Americans really don't want sprawl, and Duany and Plater-Zyberk have built a nice and cozy and very false world for themselves around the idea that if they just provide some appealing street designs and catchy slogans everything will be like it used to be.

To be sure, the book is jam-packed with stats on how much Americans love places like Georgetown and Charleston, S.C.; but these are places folks go on vacation, and during the majority of their lives most Americans still prefer the frontier feeling of a giant ranch house somewhere in Northern Virginia, Westchester County or Atlanta's ring suburbs.

"Suburban Nation" is a good read, and its go-get'em attitude makes you feel, for just a second, like maybe there is hope for our increasingly damned society after all. That is, until you leave the bookstore and almost get run over by a soccer mom in her Lincoln Navigator.

— Clay Risen (clay@flakmag.com)