Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream

ANNOTATION

A lively lament about the failures of postwar planning, Suburban Nation is also that rare book that offers solutions.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Founders of the Congress for the New Urbanism, Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk assess sprawl's costs to society, be they ecological, economic, aesthetic, or social. This book is a lively critical lament, and an entertaining lesson on the distinctions between postwar suburbia - characterized by housing clusters, strip shopping centers, office parks, and parking lots - and the traditional neighborhoods that were built as a matter of course until mid-century. It indicts the design and development industries for the fact that America no longer builds towns. Most important, though, it is a book that also offers us solutions.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Like "an architectural version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, our main streets and neighborhoods have been replaced by alien substitutes, similar but not the same," state Duany, Plater-Zyberk and Speck in this bold and damning critique. The authors, who lead a firm that has designed more than 200 new neighborhoods and community revitalization plans, challenge nearly half a century of widely accepted planning and building practices that have produced sprawling subdivisions, shopping centers and office parks connected by new highways. These practices, they contend, have not only destroyed the traditional concept of the neighborhood, but eroded such vital social values as equality, citizenship and personal safety. Further, they charge that current suburban developments are not only economically and environmentally "unsustainable," but "not functional" because they isolate and place undue burdens on at-home mothers, children, teens and the elderly. Adapting the precepts that famed urbanologist Jane Jacobs used to critique unhealthy city planning, Duany, Plater-Zyberk and Speck call for a revolution in suburban design that emphasizes neighborhoods in which homes, schools, commercial and municipal buildings would be integrated in pedestrian-accessible, safe and friendly settings. While occasionally presenting unsupported claims--such as that gated communities (of which there are now more than 20,000 in the U.S.) deprive children of gaining "a sense of empathy" in a diverse society--their visionary book holds out hope that we can create "places that are as valuable as the nature they displaced." (Mar.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Harlan - Entertainment Weekly

Lucidly detailing the environmental, aesthetic, and social costs of sprawl, the authors deliver a passionate, stylish manifesto on community quality of life.

Suzannah Lessard - WQ Magazine

Suburban Nation is a little like a New Urbanist town: smooth, adept, controlling in the way that tacitly excludes alternative views of reality.

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

I usually find missionaries and visionaries tiresome, or scary. But the authors of this book are different. Their diagnosis of late-twentieth-century American ugliness is full-bore, but their prescriptions are nuanced and sensible. Their single-mindedness about what's right is tempered by a hard-earned knowledge of what's practical. They even have a sense of humor. Suburban Nation, as inspiring as it is useful, may be the best guide to reforming the free market ever published. It made me feel like a citizen again. — Kurt Anderson, author of Turn of the Century

One does not have to agree with all the arguments in this impassioned critique of suburbia to admire-and learn from-the authors' proven commitment to improving our built environment. An important book by America's premier town planners. — Witold Rybczynski, author of City Life and The Most Beautiful House in the World

Vincent Scully, Sterling Professor Emeritus of the History of Art, Yale University

A clear-eyed, closely reasoned description by its founders of the most important movement in American architecture and city making of this generation: the New Urbanism, based not upon the "nostalgia" for which it has been unjustly criticized but upon solid architectural, historical, and sociological analysis and hard common sense. — Vincent Scully

Richard Moe, President, National Trust for Historic Preservation

For anyone interested in fighting sprawl and promoting smart growth, this important new book is essential reading. Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck have put flesh on the bones of the New Urbanism movement and given much-needed impetus to the promise it holds for America. — Richard Moe

The ideas set forth in this book amount to a revolution in design. They will be hailed or denounced; copied or spurned; realized or aborted. But they cannot be ignored, not if we care about the landscapes and localities where a majority of Americans now life. — Andrew Ross, American Studies Program, New York University, and author of The Celebration Chronicles

A book of luminous intelligence and wit. The fiasco of suburbia has never been so clearly described. This is not just a manifesto on architecture and civic design but a major literary event. — James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere and Home from Nowhere

Robert A. M. Stern, Dean, Yale School of Architecture

Suburban Nation is an essential text for our time, as compelling and important as Jane Jacob's The Death and Life of Great American Cities and Venturi, Brown, and Izenour's Learning from Las Vegas. This book is not only a passionately argued, carefully reasoned dissection of the mess that is becoming man-made America but also a clear program of steps that can be taken to enhance the humanity of both our suburbs and our cities while conserving our rapidly dwindling countryside. Everyone who cares about the future of our American way of life should read this book. — Robert A. M. Stern

This book packs a powerful punch: The city of the future turns out to be the old neighborhood. Sprawl, the dominant pattern of the past, doesn't have to be the wave of the future. Whether or not you subscribe to all of its arguments, Suburban Nation draws attention to the need to radically re-think the way our cities grow- both in our inner cities and on the urban edge. — Andrew Cuomo

Joseph P. Riley, Jr., Mayor, City of Charleston