Phoenix sprawls into the desert at the rate of an acre an hour. Greater New York City stretches clear into Pennsylvania. Strip malls, traffic, fear of crime have wrecked the tranquil 'burbs of Ozzie and Harriet's time. How can we bring civility back to suburban life?

Paved Paradise

Phoenix sprawls into the desert at the rate of an acre an hour. Greater New York City stretches clear into Pennsylvania. Strip malls, traffic, fear of crime have wrecked the tranquil 'burbs of Ozzie and Harriet's time. How can we bring civility back to suburban life?

The "new urbanists" are going back to the future to take the edge off edge cities. They want to bring small-town charm to blighted metropolitan landscapes.

Viewed from the air, there's no apparent reason why a city like Phoenix, Ariz., already the seventh largest in the nation, couldn't keep growing forever. They show the white boxes of downtown, the graceful loop of the freeways as they intersect and sort themselves out by compass pont, and the gleaming roofs of suburbia stretching to the horizon in nested curves of roads, streets, drives and lanes. The pictures from the end of March show 5,000 more houses than the ones taken three months earlier. Houses squeeze through the gap between two Indian reservations and follow the highways into the desert, which they are consuming at an acre an hour. Excluding federal land, the only thing standing in the way of Phoenix's swallowing the rest of the state, says Michael Fifield, director of the Joint Urban Design Program of Arizona State University, is Tucson.

Unless, that is, you subscribe to the view of former mayor Terry Goddard, that Phoenix is approaching the marginal disutility of suburban sprawl. This is the point at which each new subdivision subtracts more from the quality of life than the new inhabitants will contribute to the economy by buying wind chimes, mesquite logs and Navajo-motif throw rugs. Many other places in the country are coming round to this view. Most suburbs are exploding in size without even the compensation of economic growth; the Cleveland metropolitan area expanded by a third between 1970 and 1990 even as its population declined. California's population increased by 40 percent while the total of vehicle-miles driven doubled. Maintaining a fleet of cars to navigate among the housing tracts, commercial strips and office complexes of the American landscape now takes 18 percent of the average family budget.

As anyone who reads the fiction in The New Yorker knows, American mostly live in banal places with the souls of shopping malls, affording nowhere to mingle except traffic jams, nowhere to walk except in the health club. But economic unsustainability may carry more weight. A conference on "Alternatives to Sprawl" at the Brookings Institution this year was electrified by a report from the Bank of America endorsing the formerly elitist view that sprawl in California has created "enormous social, environmental and economic costs, which until now have been hidden, ignored, or quietly borne by society ... Businesses suffer from higher costs, a loss in worker productivity, and underutilized investments in older communities." "You can't keep spreading out," says Mike Burton, executive director of Portland, Ore.'s metropolitan government, Metro. "The cost to make roads and sewers gets to the point where it doesn't work."

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THE CHALLENGE IS TO DEVISE AN ALTERNATIVE TO SPRAWL, where people can envision their children playing in the streets. It must not evoke "the city", an alien place where by definition middle-class Americans refuse to live. So a growing corps of visionaries, of which the best-known are Miami-based architects Andres Duany and his wife and partner, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, are looking to an even older model - the "village," defined as a cluster of houses around a central place that is the focus of civic life. Under the banner of "new urbanism," they have promulgated some surprisingly simple and obvious rules for building better suburbs, described in detail on the following pages. They can be roughly summarized in these three principles:

Density: A typical modern suburb may have one or two dwelling units per acre, and is laid out entirely for the convenience of the automobile. The new urbanism strives for five or six units per acre, including a mix of housing types: detached houses, row houses, apartments, "granny flats" tucked away above garages. In theory -and the new urbanism still exists mostly in theory - the village would extend no more than a quarter-mile from the center to the edge and include a transit stop and a place to buy a quart of milk and a newspaper (actually, probably, a decaf latte and a copy of The Kenyon Review, but the point is the same).

Civic Space: Suburbs - except for the streets - consist of almost exclusively private space, much of it devoted to the single most useless form of plant life in all botany, the ornamental lawn. A suburb is a place that's two-third grass but with nowhere for kids to play ball, except in the streets. Communities need park sand outdoor public spaces in whch people can gather and interact.

Mandatory design codes: Obviously, no one with a choice in the matter would want to look out his window at a 7-eleven. New urbanist practitioners impose elaborate design and zoning controls intended to create harmonious streetscapes. The results can be intensively cute and not to the taste of people unaccustomed to seeing dormers, gables and porticos on every building. But cuteness is the glue that holds neighborhoods together at five units per acre.

Like most visionary architectural schemes, this idea has sold more books than houses. Its principles were known to planners early in the century, when such charming communities as Scarsdale, N.Y., Mariemont, Ohio, and LakeForrest, Ill., were built. But they were forgotten in the postwar rush to build suburbs on the same principles of efficiency that had been employed in constructing army bases. Their first new application came a decade ago, when Duany and Plater-Zyberk drew up plans for a small resort town on the Florida panhandle, called Seaside. Seaside - with its cozy, narrow streets, its jumble of pastel homes with mandatory front porches - is probably the most influential resort community since Versailles. Prince Charles noted it approvingly in his BBC special on architecture. Since then other "neotraditional" developments have been built in places as far-flung as suburban Maryland (Kentlands, also planned by Duany and Plater-Zyberk) and the outskirts of Sacramento, Calif. (Laguna West, planned by Peter Calthorpe of San Francisco). But the real test of this idea will come in about a year, when the Disney Co. opens its first planned community ever, Celebration, Fla., on a 5,000-acre swath of land near Disney World. After considering a typical subdivision built around a golf course, the company opted for a plan which vice president Wing Chao described as "traditional little-town America." Celebration will either validate the new urbanism with the imprimatur of Disney - "safe for middle-class consumption" - or prove the point of its critics, that it's a plot to lure unwitting citizens into living in theme parks.

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You can look at Phoenix as a pretty good example of what the new urbanism is up against. It is among the five-fastest growing metropolises in the country, and a few places are as relentlessly suburban in character. It has a downtown so exiguous that a pedestrian outside its biggest office building at 9 on a weekday morning is a phenomenon as singular as a cow in Times Square. Meanwhile the new subdivision race each other toward the mountains. Dell Webb Corp., a major national developer, recently won approval over heated opposition for a 5,600-acre project in New River, 30 miles north of downtown and at least 10 miles beyond the outer edge of existing development. The environment, which to developers used to just be the stuff they knocked down to make room for houses, is now a cherished selling point. There is a catch, according to Frances Emma Barwood, a city council member who represent most of the sparsely populated northeast quadrant of Phoenix: "The people who bought houses in Phase One (of a popular development) were told they'd be surrounded by a beautiful lush deserts, but instead they're surrounded by Phases Two and Three."

LEFT BEHIND IN THIS RUSH to embrace nature are thousands of 1960-era ranch houses that are too old, small and unfashionable to attract middle-class buyers, and as a result are turning into that new American phenomenon, the suburban slum. This may be the fate of an area called Maryvalle, which like all west-side suburbs suffers from the competitive disadvantage that commuters must drive into the sun both ways. Interspersed among the houses are large tracts of vacant land, dreary commercial strips and a mall, once the cynosure of a thriving neighborhood, now dark and empty. "For the same money that Dell Webb is spending in New River, I'll bet they could buy up most of this area and rebuilt it," Goddard says. "What is the imperative that says we have to go to a beautiful rural area when we have all this land a few miles from the downtown? We're destroying ourselves in shorter and shorter cycles."

The imperative, as Goddard well knows, is "the market." To build in an existing neighborhood, says Jack Gleason, a senior vice president at Dell Webb, is to "run against the market, instead of with it." Banks are reluctant to lend to such "infill" projects because they have no assurance the houses will sell. A prime engine of Phoenix's growth apparently consists of middle-aged couples fleeing California. This is a market, Gleason notes, heavily driven by "security", the polite term for "fear." "Fear of crime is a great motivator for development," says Joe Verdoorn, a Phoenix planner. "Everybody wants to be on the far side of the freeway."

So the new subdivisions go up behind ocher-colored stucco walls six feet high, with guards and gates between public roads and the inner sanctum of residential streets. Other kinds of barriers defend something nearly as dear to suburbanites as their own skins, property values. Homeowners are isolated by design from apartments, shops, public squares or anything else that might attract people with less money or of a different race. Deed restrictions and community associations see to it that no one will ever bring down the tone of the neighborhood by turning his living room into a beauty parlor. Success for a development lies in freezing for eternity the social and economic class of the original purchasers.

No wonder they're so sterile - sterility is designed into them. Anything else is a threat to the steady appreciation of resale value homeowning Americans take as a basic economic right. You drive down the wide, curving streets of Terravita, in north Scottsdale, whose sales slogan is "The Harmony of Land and Life," and the only signs of "Life" are the saguaro cactuses, which accrue at the rate of about an inch a year. The houses themselves are magnificent monuments to family life: thoughtfully designed, carefully constructed, with master bath suites the size of the Oval Office, but the face they turn to the streets is the blank brown plane of a three-car garage.

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TO EVEN THINK OF CHANGING THIS CULTURE is an enormous task. It runs counter to the dominant ideology of free-market economics, which in its reductive fashion holds that developers by definition are building what people want to buy. "There is this strange conceit among architects," says Peter Gordon, a professor of economics at the University of Southern California, "that people ought to live in what they design. If you look at how people really want to live in this country, suburbanization is not the problem, it is the solution." And for that matter, Oscar Newman, a celebrated New York-based urban planner, describes the new urbanism as"a regressive sentimentality." American families typically live in a neighborhood for three to five years, forming communities based not on common birthplace but on interest: young singles, families with children, "active adults." Who among us, Newman asks, really want to re-create the social ambience of an 18^th-century village? He thinks the suburbs need more exclusivity, gates and barriers where none exits already, recognizing that most of us are going to live among strangers for most of our lives.

On the other hand, people can buy only what's for sale. The housing market is notoriously conservative and conformist, if for no other reason than that most people expect to sell their houses someday. Perhaps more people would choose to live in urban villages if they were exposed to them. "If you ask people if they want 'density', they will always say no," says Peter Katz, author of "The New Urbanism." "But if you ask if they want restaurants and schools and other things close to where they live, they say yes." But you couldn't builda villagein most places in the country even if you wanted to. Suburban sprawl is built into the zoning codes of most communities and the lending policies of virtually every bank. For new villages to become a reality, they will have to get past a phalanx of planning boards and bank officers, whose first principle is, "Nobody ever lost his job for following the code."

We are, nevertheless, on the verge of a great opportunity. Americans moved to the suburbs for the best of motives - to give their children better schools, cleaner air, a place to ride their bicycles without getting their tires caught in the trolley tracks. Suburbs should teem with life, with humanity in all its diversity (or as much diversity as you can find within one standard deviation of the median family income) - with people walking, running, biking, rocking. But their design has promoted instead the ideals of privacy and exclusivity: the clapboard-sided ranch house, evocative of empty plains; the brick colonial, hinting a descent from the Virginia aristocracy. We can continue the trend of the last 40 years, which Gopal Ahluwalia, director of research for the National Association of Homebuilders, complacently describers as bigger houses, with more amenities, situated farther from the workplace. Or we can go down a different path, which probably with the kind of humble observation a visitor made at a subdivision near Phoenix recently. Like most developments, this one aimed to conserve water for important uses - namely the golf course - by landscaping the houses with gravel and cactus rather than lawns. As the visitor paced the lot with a puzzled look, it suddenly dawned on him that the desire for an acre of land is not an unvarying constituent of human nature. "Gee," he remarked wonderingly to a saleswoman, "if it's all gravel, you don't really need that much f it, do you?"

With Maggie Malone and Patrick Rogers in New York, Nina Archer Biddle in Memphis, Spencer Reiss in Miami, Jeanne Gordon in Los Angeles, Paul Kandell in San Francisco and Daniel Glick in Washington.

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15 Ways to Fix the Suburbs

Most of us actually know what we want in a neighborhood - we just don't know how to get it, because developers have been building the wrong think for 50years. Here's how to get our communities back on track.

FOR DECADES, ANTON NELESSON of Rutgers University has been using the tools of science to pursue that most elusive and subjective quality, happiness. When a developer comes into a community, humbly seeking permission to re-create ancient Pompeii on the site of an old Go Kart track, the town's planners commission Nelesson to survey the populace and determine if that's what they'd actually like there. Using photographs, models and questionnaires, Nelesson has surveyed people all over the country, and these are some of the things he's found:

• "Everybody will call for a green open space in the middle - that's automatic. They will put the major community buildings around the plaza, then group thehouses on relatively narrow streets. Ninety-nine percent don't want streets that are more than two lanes wide. At the edges of the village they leave open space."
• "With two working spouses, [smaller lots] make a lot more sense. You don't want to mow that big lawn."
• "People have a fundamental, psychological, spiritual response to nature. If you show them recently built multi-family housing or office parks, they go negative. A samll, traditional neighborhood is what people want. They don't know how to get it."

Well, of course they don't: most of them haven't even seen a "small, traditional neighborhood" in years, if ever. But they instinctively choose it anyway. The premise of the new urbanism is that people can have the kinds of neighborhoods they say they like. Architects know how to design them, developers can build them, banks can make money on them. All it takes is a measure of political will to overcome the inertia of 50 years of doing things the wrong way ... and the application of a few simple rules.

GIVE UP BIG LAWNS

1 ONE USEFUL WAY TO DEFINE A SUBURB is "a place that grows lawns." The great postwar disillusionment began for many Americans when they left the city in search of a simpler life and discovered that watering, fertilizing, weeding and mowing measliest yard takes more time over a year than the average New Yorker spends looking for parking. And the expenses of front lawn themselves serve no purpose but their owners' vanity - except that most suburban communities require them, on the theory that large setbacks help preserve the bucolic character of a community.

That may have been true in the 1920s, when suburbs were being settled 30 houses at a time. But when highways opened up huge areas of countryside after the war, large-lot zoning had the opposite effect: by spreading population over a large area, it accelerated sprawl. If zoning boards weren't so fearful of "density", they could require developers to cluster houses and set aside land nearby for open space and recreation. This is also a more efficient way to build a community. Houses that are 100 feet apart, obviously, have 100 feet of unused road and utility lines between them. School buses have that much farther to travel.

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And the goal of making a walkable community is defeated when houses are spread out on huge lots. Even the depth of the front yard turns out to make a crucial psychological difference. When houses are set back behind 30 feet of lawn, the streetscape becomes oppressively desolate; your perspective changes so slowly you don't feel you're reaching a destination. Probably no single change would improve the quality of suburban life as much as shrinking the size of lots - and it would actually make houses cheaper.

BRING BACK THE CORNER STORE.

2 THE SUBURBAN CONDITION, says architect Peter Calthorpe, "is a landscape of absolute segregation ... not just in terms of income, age or ethnicity, but simple functional uses." This is so obvious that most people no longer see the absurdity of making a five-mile round trip for a loaf of bread. That is, as long as they have a car; for anyone not so blessed - children, the elderly or handicapped, people who can't afford a car for every member of the family - it's nuts.

Again, this is a function of good intentions undone by the explosion of suburbia. What worked in a compact neighborhood in a city - a dry cleaner, a drugstore, a corner grocery - became grotesque when blown up a hundredfold and applied to whole counties. Shopping strips stretched for dozens of miles along the highways, while the curving streets of suburbia wormed their way ever deeper into the countryside.

Obviously, malls and supermarkets, with their vast selections and economies of scale, will never be supplanted by neighborhood shopping streets and corner groceries. But it still should be possible to provide some of the necessities of life within walking distance of many people. Then you could send your kid out for that bread - and a newspaper while he's at it.

MAKE THE STREETS SKINNY

3 MODERN SUBDIVISIONS ARE DESIGNED TO BE DRIVEN, not walked. Even little-used streets are 36 feet or 40 feet wide, with big sweeping curves at the corners. It's great for cars: traffic barely needs to slow down. But for those on foot, the distance is daunting. Narrow streets - as little as 26 feet wide - and tight, right angled corners area lot easier for walkers, and probably safer as well, because they force drivers to slow down. One objection: fire departments worry about getting trucks through. But that hasn't been a big problem in old nabes in cities like New York and Boston.

DROP THE CUL-DE-SAC

4 THE CUL-DE-SAC, A FANCY TERM FOR "DEAD END", has emerged as the street plan of choice for modern suburbs Its great advantage - the elimination of through traffic - is also its weakness, because it compels everyone in a given subdivision to use the same few roads, often at the same times. Anyone attempting to travel on foot or by bicycle will eventually wind upon the shoulder of a busy highway - and probably give up. But streets don't have to be like that: they can follow predictable routes and interconnect. This gives motorists a choice of routes, so they don't all pileup every morning waiting to make a left turn at the same intersection.

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DRAW BOUNDARIES

5 IN AN ABSOLUTE SENSE, THERE IS NO REAL SHORTAGE OF LAND in the United States; if the entire population lived on an acre of land per household, it would occupy less than 5 percent of the contiguous 48 states (plus all of Canada and Mexico for parking). But in the regions where Americans actually want to live, they are swarming into the countryside, covering whole counties with "edge cities" flung outward from the beltways as if by centrifugal force. New York City's suburbs reach across the whole state of New Jersey into eastern Pennsylvania, nearly 100 miles from Times Square. To new-urbanist theoreticians, this is the disastrous result of shortsighted government policies, such as the bias in the federal mortgage-guarantee program toward detached houses on large plots of land. To free-market economists, it represents the sum of million of choices by informed individuals who have decided that, on balance, getting up before dawn in Bucks County beats a full night's sleep in Brooklyn.

But sprawl is not a necessary component of affluence. In Europe and Japan, governments have proclaimed "urban-growth boundaries," beyond which development is more or less prohibited. Even in a democratic country such as Holland, a businessman seeking to live on a farm and drive into the city to work would have to request permission from the government - and he might not get it. Try telling that to Lee Iacocca. Contrary to popular American political theory, these regulations haven't noticeably affected the prosperity of Western Europe - nor of the one major American city that has instituted its own urban-growth boundary: Portland, Ore.

In Oregon, naturally, no one would prevent the hypothetical businessman from living on a farm; he just couldn't sell it off for a subdivision when he retired to Palm Springs. More than 20 years ago, planners for the Portland metropolitan area drew a line around 325 square mles - covering 24 municipalities and parts of three counties - and designated it to receive virtually all population growth. Along the way they have reduced the average lot size for detached houses from 13,000 square feet to an average of 8,500 square feet - roughly the difference between putting three and five units on an acre. The proposed future goal is even mingier 6,600 square feet. Between now and the year 2040, Portland's planners expect the population to grow some 77 percent, but they are committed to an increase of residential land use of only 6 percent. Instead of planting more "edge cities" at the arbitrary points where freeways intersect, Portland has concentrated job growth in its downtown. The urban-growth boundary has been so successful that even a conservative property-rights group, Oregonians in Action, endorses the concept (although it argues with some details). Imagine how Los Angeles would look today if it had done this 20 years ago.

HIDE THE GARAGE

6 MOST SUBURBAN HOUSES GIVE THE APPEARANCE that they are first of all places to park, turning to the world the blank and desolate face of a garage dooor. Neighborhoods look more pleasant when garages are put behind the houses, accessible by side yards or by alleys.

MIX HOUSING TYPES

7 OF ALL THE WAYS TO IMPROVE THE SOCIAL AND PHYSICAL organization of the suburbs, none would be as subversive as breaking the monopoly of single-family detached homes: that endless alternation of "Crestwoods" and "Auroras" intended to foster the illusion of preference in buyers' choosing between four bedrooms and three bedroom plus a den. Homogeneity is the very essence of the suburbs. Attached houses, rental units, shops or businesses -anything that might attract traffic and its attendant evil, a decline in property values - are banned.

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This is a fairly new phenomenon in human history. For most of the last 9,000 years, most people inhabited villages, where by definition nothing was very far from anything else. As late as the 1940s, for that matter, Memphis, Tenn., developer Henry Turley grew up in the kind of haphazard city neighborhood that is the despair of sensible planners: a jumble of stores, shacks, flats, walk-ups and decaying mansions, all suffused with the vivid street life neighbors made for themselves in the era before air conditioning lured them indoors. It is, of course, beyond the power of zoning to bring back those days, even if we wanted them back, but it may be possible to recapture some of the energy and spirit that characterized American civic life before television clamped its monopoly on public discourse and entertainment. So in 1987, when Turley bought a 135-acre vacant plot on an island in the Mississippi five minutes from downtown Memphis, he embarked on a radically different kind of development, which began not by asking "What will the county let me build?" or "What will the banks finance?" but "What kind of place do people want to live in?"

The result was Harbor Town, intended to be "a slice of the world - the more complete and varied the better." There are houses ranging in price from $114,000 to $425,000, which contrasts with a typical subdivision in Phoenix, Ariz., for example, where the seven basic models run the gamut from $271,990 to 316,990. There are town houses and apartments, and shops being planned. Developers had tried mixing housing types in the "planned communities" of the 1970s, but in those each use was isolated in its own thousand-acre quadrant; in Harbor Town they are all within a few blocks of each other. Turley seems to have decreed that instead of golf, the leading recreational activity would be chatting with neighbors while watching the sun set over the river, so he set the houses close together and built cozy village squares. The houses themselves are an eye-popping collection of styles, including Charlestown provincial, Cape Cod and Bauhaus modern, but they have an underlying unity based on materials (mostly clapboards or wood siding) and the ubiquitous new-urbanist amenity, porches. Turley expects to make money on the project, when it's completed in 1997, but he has also a higher aim. "Democracy assumes -- demands -- that we know, understand and respect our fellow citizens," he says. "How can we appreciate them if we never see them?"

PLANT TREES CURBSIDE

8 NOTHING HUMANIZES A STREET MORE than a row of trees shading the sidewalk.. But they must be broad-leafed shade trees such as sycamores or chestnuts, not the dinky globular things like flowering pears that developers favor in parking lots. And they should be planted out at the curbline, where they will grow out to form a canopy over the roadway. Why don't more places have such an obvious amenity already? Because traffic engineers worry that people might drive into them.

PUT NEW LIFE INTO OLD MALLS

9 THEY'VE GOT FOUNTAINS, HANGING FERNS AND ICE RINKS, and if you stay in one long enough you may eventually hear "Wichita Lineman" rescored for 140 violins, but most shopping malls are, essentially, just vast sheds that consumers trudge through until, with nothing left to spend, they are spit out into the parking lot. No wonder people are so quick to desert them when a bigger one opens up down the road. Ghost malls are no longer a rare sight in America. Phoenix has at least two, including one right across the street from several of its largest office buildings. But the land they occupy can, with some ingenuity and a lot of money, become the nucleus of a real neighborhood, an architectural adornment rather than hulking blight.

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The process is happening first with strip shopping centers, which are usually older than the enclosed malls and less complex architecturally. The first step is to transcend the definition of a"shopping center" as a grouping of unrelated stores in the middle of a parking lot. That pretty much describes the New Seabury Shopping Center, a dreary 1960-era strip mall on a busy highway in Cape Cod, Mass., about 70 miles from Boston. A decade ago, the owners decided to redevelop it on a radically different scheme, modeled on a New England town. New streets were laid out in what had been the parking lot; new shops were built in the neglected area behind the existing ones. A 25-year development plan was drawn up, envisioning a substantial community; offices, a library, a church and a senior-citizens' home have already been built.

Parking was redistributed along the curbs of the new internal streets. This makes for some congestion and inefficiency, but lessens the frustration of trudging down long aisles of parked cars toward a distant mall entrance. Developer Douglass Storss says that shoppers find the strength to walk as much as half a mile down the sidewalks of what is now called Mashpee Commons, passing shop windows, benches and planters. The same people reach the threshold of exasperation when they have to park more than 400 feet from the door to an ordinary mall.

There are other examples, including Mizner Park, in Boca Raton, Fla., where a failing shopping center was replaced with a 28-acre mixed-use development organized around a new public park. To be sure, not all developers will be this ambitious with their properties. But as a first step, hiding the ugly collection of Dumpsters and loading docks on the backsides of strip malls could eliminate a lot of suburban blight.

PLAN FOR MASS TRANSIT

10 IS THERE ANY WAY TO GET AMERICANS OUT OF THEIR CARS and into buses and trains? In Los Angeles, not even an earthquake sufficed; only about 2 percent of drivers switched to mass transit after their freeways fell down last year, and most of them went right back to driving as soon as the roads were patched up.

The problem is that transit seems to need a critical mass to work, and many metropolitan areas (Los Angeles among them) are just too spread out. Many commuters seem to think that if you have to drive to the train station anyway, you might as well just keep going to the office.

Hence Calthorpe's idea for the "pedestrian pocket": a relatively dense settlement within a quarter-mile walk of a transit stop. In Portlant, Ore., they're building the transit line first - putting stops literally in the middle of empty streets - in the expectation that the development will follow.

LINK WORK TO HOME

11 SUBURBS ARE NO LONGER JUST BEDROOM COMMUNITIES; the dispersal of employment out of the central cities has been going on for a generation. (As the writer William H. Whyte demonstrated two decades ago, big corporations leaving the city tend to relocate within a few miles of the chief executive's house.) But the result - the oxymoronic "office parks" consisting of indistinguishable glass cubes amid a token fuzz of grass and a giant parking lot - is just a higher class of sprawl than the gas stations and fried-chicken places that would have been built there instead.

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If companies don't want to be downtown, they should at least attempt to integrate their offices - or factories, for that matter - into communities. Nobody wants to live next to a steel mill, naturally. But in Laguna West, outside Sacramento, people are happy to live within a quarter-mile of an Apple Computer plant, which provides 1,200 white-collar and assembly-line jobs. Apple agreed to locate there after the community was already planned; developer Phil Angelides says the company liked the idea that the executives and workers could afford to live in the same community. Playa Vista, a new-urbanist community being planned for Los Angeles, has been mentioned as a possible home for the DreamWorks SKG multimedia company. It could be an updated - and very upscale - version of the company town, which in this case will comprise 13,000 houses and apartments, shops, a park, promenades and jogging trails along the last tidal marsh in the city.

Calthorpe believes that more businesses will move to new-urbanist projects as they grow disillusioned with the traffic and isolation of their office parks. "The idea is not necessarily to live in the same development you work in," he says; 'there are a lot of criteria for where you choose your house. But if people can walk to a park, to midday shopping, restaurants and day care, it's better for the people working there."

MAKE A TOWN CENTER

12 EVERY TOWN NEEDS A CENTER: a plaza, square or green that is a geographical reference point and a focus of civic life - even if that just means a place to push a stroller or throw a Frisbee. Shopping malls are a poor substitute; the area they serve is too diffuse, and in any case their civic function is incidental to their real purpose - making money. Developers often provide some parkland in their subdivisions, but it's usually on leftover parcels that wouldn't be built on anyway, by the edge of the highway or adjoining another subdivision.

SHRINK PARKING LOTS

13 PARKING IS ONE OF SUBURBIA'S HIGHEST ACHIEVEMENTS. Only in the United States does the humblest copy-shop or pizzeria boast as much space for cars as the average city hall. But it is also a curse; the vast acreage given over to asphalt is useless for any other purpose, and goes unused more then half the time anyway. Most planners regard parking as a prerequisite for economic growth, like water. But downtown Portland, Ore.,which strictly regulates parking, has been thriving with essentially the same space for cars as it had 20 years ago. Developers often build more parking that they actually need; a half-empty lot is presumed reassure prospective tenants that they'll never run out of space for their cars. Yet a bank, a movie theater and a church are all full at different times. One simple improvement towns can make is to look for ways to share and pool parking space among different users.

The ideal - although expensive - solution to the parking problem is for cars to vanish underground when they get where they're going. A shopping center surrounded by acres of striped asphalt, whether it's empty or full, might as well put up a moat against pedestrians. Large parking lots should be situated behind buildings whenever possible - something most suburban zoning codes don't currently allow-and divided by streets, sidewalks or structures into smaller segments of around three acres or less. On-street parking in residential neighborhoods is controversial. Some planners favor it, because it creates a "buffer" between pedestrians and traffic, but others consider it a danger to children running out between cars.

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TURN DOWN THE LIGHTS

14 IT IS PROBABLY TRUE THAT ILLUMINATING A SUBURBAN STREET to the level of the infield at Comiskey Park reduces accidents, especially for people who leave their regular glasses at home and have to drive in sunglasses. For everyone else, though, towering, garish sodium-vapor street lamps intrude on the peacefulness of the night with the insistence of a stuck horn. Where safety is not a big issue, why not use several smaller lamps that cast a gentler glow and let you see the stars?

15 OUT BEYOND THE BELTWAY, where the roads are narrow and blacktop, past the point at which the dwindling traffic is too sparse to warrant plucking by even the mingiest motor court, there's a beautiful land. There are pale green corn plants poking through the brown soil, lakes glimpsed through trees, cholla cactus among the tumbled red rocks. It's not wilderness, but countryside, the unfinished canvass of America. It tells us where we are - in Illinois, Maine or Texas - and it locates us in time: summer, fall, winter, spring. There's nothing to buy there, nowhere to park; it doesn't lure us with golden arches or free coffee mugs with a fill-up. It's just there.

And by the same token, it isn't making anyone rich, yet. There is a gradient of value that runs from the city to the country, and it keeps moving outward; pick any spot and it's just a matter of time before it makes the magical transition from the "countryside" to "real estate." The process seems inevitable, but it isn't, really. It's the product of concrete decisions made in an age when roads were still viewed as the harbingers of civilization rather than discount muffler outlets. And as surely as our society made those decisions, it can change them, before lawn meets lawn and asphalt meets asphalt, covering the land in a seamless carpet of sprawl.

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