Repairing the American Metropolis: Common Place Revisited. (Limits of Unified Theory).

By Douglas Kelbaugh. Washington: University of Washington Press. 2002. [pounds sterling]22.95

In the last decade, the New Urbanism has come to dominate much of the discussion of urban design in the United States. Repairing the American Metropolis: Common Place Revisited, a rewrite of the author's earlier book Common Place: Toward Neighborhood and Regional Design, is an intelligent restatement of the principles associated with the New Urbanism. In a readable style accessible to designer and layperson alike, Kelbaugh discusses, if at times a bit superficially, a broad range of topics: urban sprawl, critical regionalism, architectural typologies and their uses in urban design, and the principles of the New Urbanism. At the heart of the discussion of each topic are a set of prescriptions for curing what ails our cities.

The author's goals are certainly commendable; for example, seeking ways to end urban sprawl, increasing urban infill and building the basis for a more robust public life in our cities. Many of his suggestions are important reminders of how urban designers can effect positive changes in our cities. Nonetheless, like so many New Urbanists, Kelbaugh shows a smug certainty that New Urbanist nostrums if adopted would not only stop sprawl, and create environmentally more sustainable cities, but also build the basis for a robust public life by overcoming urban, social and cultural fragmentation.

Kelbaugh dismisses or ignores the increasingly sophisticated criticisms of the New Urbanism that have been voiced since his earlier book. If critics argue that the New Urbanism 's iconic projects arc mostly located on greenfields and do not remedy urban sprawl, well the New Urbanists are able to do other things as well, he avers. If so many New Urbanist projects do not respond to the context in which they are built, that is because so much of what surrounds them in the suburbs is flawed and in the urban core frayed, he argues. Equally to the point there are many criticisms Kelbaugh does not address; for example, that many New Urbanist projects are effectively gated, many are as dependent on the automobile-based shopping mall as other suburban communities, that building place-based community adds to the problems of urban, social and political fragmentation and the New Urbanism replaces the discussion of potentially transformative economic, political and social action in the city with simplistic design anodynes .

Like CIAM and the Modernists he mostly vilifies, Kelbaugh mirrors their faith in an all encompassing solution to what ails the city. If much of what he suggests is useful if unexceptional, his refusal to learn from the past that no single one-dimensional approach to urban design can nor should be expected to shoulder such a monumental and intractable task, makes this an ultimately disappointing book.