From NEWSWEEK magazine, via The BoxTank:
In contrast to the powers who fight "sprawl," advocates of the new suburbanism focus on ways to make the periphery work better. It's about bringing business and jobs, not just bedrooms, to the outer rings, and reviving main streets in smaller towns and cities, not just in major urban centers. In some senses, the new suburbanism seeks to recover the ideals of early advocates of decentralization such as the early-20th-century British visionary Ebenezer Howard, who proposed dispersing populations into largely self-sustaining "garden cities."
Correcting the problems of suburbia is an international imperative. Almost everywhere, cities tend toward sprawl, more like much-maligned Los Angeles than like Manhattan, the urbanist's heaven. This pattern owes largely to the preference of the middle and working classes for privacy and space—choices ridiculed as boringly bourgeois by urban theorists. "L.A. is the realization of every immigrant's dream—the vassal's dream of his own castle," observed the Italian-born, Los Angeles-based urbanist Edgardo Contini in the 1960s. "Europeans who come here are delighted by our suburbs. Not to live in an apartment! It is a universal aspiration to own your own home." Today, surveys find that 70 to 80 percent of Americans prefer a single-family home and only 15 percent, an apartment in a dense urban area.
Link: Joel Kotkin: Building Up the Burbs - Newsweek: International Editions - MSNBC.com.
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