By Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck

(New York: North Point Press, 2000). ISBN: 978-0865476066

There is a growing movement in North America to put an end to suburban sprawl and to replace the automobile-based settlement patterns of the past fifty years with a return to more traditional planning principles. This movement stems not only from the realization that sprawl is ecologically and economically unsustainable but also from an awareness of sprawl's many victims: children, utterly dependent on parental transportation if they wish to escape the cul-de-sac; the elderly, warehoused in institutions once they lose their driver's licenses; commuters, stuck in traffic for two or more hours each day; the urban poor, isolated in deteriorating cities without access to jobs or services.

Founders of the Congress for the New Urbanism, Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk are at the forefront of this movement, and in  Suburban Nation they 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 solutions.