Room to Grow - 'Suburban Nation' examines problems with modern city planning - Critical Essay

Reason, Feb, 2001 by Sam Staley

And it's residents who create communities, not architects or planners. Urban design can certainly facilitate community building, but it can't dictate it. By the time most citizens of Celebration move in--it is expected to fill up over the next decade--virtually all the original designers and administrators will be long gone, taking their copies of Suburban Nation and other New Urbanist texts with them. The physical infrastructure will be in place, but the real building will still lie ahead, as residents forge a civic culture from their intimate understanding of what still needs to be built. Levittown didn't start out as a "place worth caring about." It evolved into one.

Sam Staley (sstaley@reason.org) is director of the Urban Futures Program at the Reason Public Policy Institute.

Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream, by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck, New York: North Point Press, 290 pages, $30

The Celebration Chronicles: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Property Value in Disney's New Town, by Andrew Ross, New York: Ballantine Books, 340 pages, $25.95

Picture Windows: How the Suburbs Happened, by Rosalyn Baxandall and Elizabeth Ewen, New York: Basic Books, 298 pages, $27.50