A Better Place to Live: Reshaping the American Suburbs.

The United States has just become a suburban-majority nation - that is, over 50 percent of Americans live in metropolitan areas but outside the city limits. As a statistic, this is up there with the Census Department's announcement 100 years ago (which became the foundation of Frederick Jackson Turner's career as the leading American historian of his day) that there was no longer a detectable frontier line. It has vast and pervasive implications: Everything from presidential politics to pop culture is now suburb-dominated, and it looks as if the suburbs are only going to continue growing.

The fields of architecture, planning, and urban studies have long been implicitly or explicitly hostile to the suburbs, palpably yearning for the day when the federal government would stop subsidizing interstate highways and home mortgages, when racial prejudice would lessen, and when, consequently, the mass migration back to the cities and yard-free, car-free living could commence. Meanwhile the opposite continues to happen - and today blacks are suburbanizing more rapidly than whites.

What Bill Clinton did in 1992 was try to arrive at a liberal Democratic political formula that would appeal to suburban voters rather than just writing off the suburbs as Republican territory. It worked, both politically and morally - most of the time Clinton has given the impression of trying to find common ground between suburbanites and liberalism, rather than pandering. It would be nice if a parallel process could occur in the design-of-space professions: If, recognizing that there's a lot not to like about the suburbs, they still tried to create a suburbia we could feel better about: one less anonymous, less segregated, less car-dependent, and more communitarian.

This is the cause that Philip Langdon (whom I know slightly by virtue of our both being associated with The Atlantic Monthly) takes on in A Better Place to Live. Rather than being a Lewis Mumford- or Jane Jacobs-like lordly architectural theorist, Langdon defines his mission as collating and promoting the work of others - mostly a loose group of architects and planners who are trying to create an improved breed of neighborhoods made up of single-family homes with yards and garages. Langdon calls these people "traditionalists"; their work recalls the earliest (in some cases pre-automobile) generation of suburbs - places like Oak Park, Illinois.

The traditionalists' main causes are re-establishing street grids, finding a balance between uniformity and variety in house design, designing houses that face and sit close to the street, and locating shopping districts nearer to residential ones. The payoff of all this, aside from how it looks, is that it would generate the human interaction and street life that so many suburbs sorely lack. The antipode of the traditionalist suburb, to Langdon, is a place like Irvine, California, which is the result of meticulous but misguided planning rather than sprawl. Everyone lives in over-regulated walled neighborhoods, you can't walk anywhere, and all shopping has to be done on huge, daunting "arterial" roads.

The natural objection to Langdon's views is that they're unrealistic: People actually like arterials, cul-de-sacs sacs, and garage-to-the-front houses, and that's why there are so many of these things. It is true that Langdon has to rely on only a tiny handful of contemporary examples (the leading one of which, Seaside, Florida, isn't a suburb at all, but a resort) to demonstrate that there is a movement toward traditionalist suburbs. On the other hand, it is undeniably true that suburbs with street grids, sidewalks, front porches, and strollable shopping districts are both more pleasant and more democratic in spirit than places like Irvine. Domestic life is highly reactive to shifts in cultural and aesthetic tastes, so it's plausible that traditionalism could first catch on as an idea and then sweep across the suburban landscape like so many previous trends. Merely promoting the idea of traditionalism is useful, and, more broadly, A Better Place to Live, like David Rusk's Cities Without Suburbs and Joel Garreau's Edge City, conveys the happy feeling that somebody out there is actively trying to find a fit between suburbanization and liberal ideals.

Nicholas Lemann, a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly, is a national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly.