Home From Nowhere: Remaking Our Everyday World for the Twenty-First Century.

If you find America's decrepit downtowns and sprawling automobile suburbs disturbing, read this book. A colleague of mine calls Kunstler's The Geography of Nowhere (Simon & Schuster, 1994), the most important book she has read in twenty years; I see why. Not only are Kunstler's books well-written - clear, funny, full of irreverent conviction - but they forge a vital link between aesthetics and ethics. If traditional principles of town planning are not returned to, he argues, the continent and its inhabitants are in peril.

"Nowhere" is Kunstler's code word for the anonymous, formless sprawl of residential and commercial suburbia, lacking all semblance of public life and the same from sea to sea. Geography is a historic account of how Americans arrived there, in the process abandoning true, locally specific cities and leaving them wastelands of decay, crime, and de facto racial segregation. Home tells a more hopeful story of how, in a few cases, architects and developers have made some limited progress toward reversing the tragic decline. Kunstler and others have created the Congress for the New Urbanism - which I joined immediately on finishing the book - and call the experiments they sponsor by various names: civic art (echoing the City Beautiful movement of 1900), Traditional Neighborhood Development (TND), or Transit Oriented Development (TOD). Related to architectural postmodernism, the New Urbanism tries to regenerate derelict sites in cities and build new, "greenfields" developments outside them that are more varied and humane than hermetic postwar tract-suburbs.

The book is divided into three parts. The opening section relates Americans' historical mistrust of the city, the elevation of the private home to the status of a "totem object" - and corresponding denigration of public life - and our insane affair with the automobile, which has been the ruination of many cities. Their physical collapse is more than a symptom of underlying economic and social problems, Kunstler argues, but to some degree a cause. In a transitional chapter that is perhaps the most debatable in the book, he argues that what the centrifugal "sprawlscape" most lacks is a quality he calls "charm" - empathetic response to universal bodily and spiritual desires. Now, architectural empathy is a controverted idea in the history of aesthetics, and I do not find Kunstler's appeals to verticals, regulating lines, and the Golden Section totally convincing - especially since the Modernist architects he condemns, especially Le Corbusier, worshiped at their altar.

Kunstler then articulates the principles of the New Urbanism: replacing zoning (imported from Germany in the early twentieth century), which isolates homes from stores and parks and public buildings and compels us to use the car for the simplest trip, with "civic art," or practices deeply rooted in history and psychology; establishing the walkable neighborhood as the module of the city; determining a hierarchy of streets, from the grand boulevard to the service alley; drawing up, preferably in community exercises called "charettes," architectural codes using language that all can understand governing basics such as sizes of houses and lots, depths of setback, and forms of roofs and porches. The goal is dynamic - to mix various types of housing with commercial and public activity. But discouraging this "new" approach, Kunstler argues, is the present system of taxing property, which promotes speculation in land and the decay of older buildings. Though traditionalist and hierarchical - so, some claim, un-American - the New Urbanism is arguably less restrictive than today's impenetrable zoning codes.

The rest of the book gives flesh to these principles by discussing places where they have or have not been applied - for weal or woe. Seaside, the neotraditional town on the Florida Panhandle developed in the eighties by architects Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk (DPZ) of Miami, standard-bearers for the New Urbanism, has been an aesthetic and residential success but has not so far attracted vigorous commercial life. So the movement's proponents want to demonstrate its potential to give life to actual, functioning communities. With the space between cities more and more sprawled out, today the most promising "frontiers" for commercial and residential "pioneers" just may be the wastelands near the hearts of old cities. Downtown (or, as locals call it, "downcity") Providence, Rhode Island, was a typical rotting Northeastern urban core until some progressives, with DPZ's help, re-envisioned it as a SoHo for the young artistic set. A maze of overlapping bureaucracies strangled the same architects' attempt to model a TND on Cape Cod, where, if anywhere, compactness would be a virtue; on the other hand, enterprising developers in Columbus and Memphis took vacant urban sites and created dynamic, mixed-use neighborhoods. Some cities show complete ignorance of effective urban typologies: Cleveland's public housing authority built suburban ranchhouses in the ghetto, and a conservation group in Kunstler's own Saratoga Springs, New York, could think of nothing better to do with a vacant site downtown than turn it into a park - opposite the town's premier existing park, designed by Olmsted! Perhaps, for all its problems, Manhattan, from which Kunstler hails, best illustrates a city scaled to walkers and their eyes (if not their ears!) and so perpetually regenerates its streets. He reserves most anxiety and vilification for South Florida, where immigration of different sorts from north and south threatens ecological Armageddon. A chapter on agriculture seems unexpected, but the farmer to whom we are introduced, Steve Gilman, is so engaging and Kunstler's argument about the peril into which agribusiness and imprudent urbanization have thrown farming so important, that we indulge him this wander.

Home from Nowhere has ethical implications that ought to engage readers. This is not a genteel, nostalgic plea for a return to elm-arched life in the small town, but a prophetic call to "turn and be saved." If I am less sanguine than Kunstler about the ability and determination of private initiative and enterprise, ungoaded, to bring us back from the brink, I read the book as an appeal for a new consciousness of cities and the environments they anchor.

Christopher Thomas teaches in the Department of Art History at the University of Victoria in British Columbia.