For Americans with even a little money, to live anywhere but a suburb is to make a statement. If you are comfortable, you are naturally a suburbanite; living out in the country or in the heart of the city has become a life-style declaration only slightly less exotic than a commitment to vegetarianism or the Latin Mass. In 1950 moving out to some spick-and-span new subdivision was the very heart of the American dream. In 1990 suburban living is simply a middle-class entitlement -- it is how people live.
New census figures show, in fact, that suburbanites will soon be the American majority, up from being about a third of the population back in 1950. Yet as America's cities and villages have dissolved into vast suburban nebulas, no one seems entirely happy with the result. From Riverside County in southern California to Fairfax County in northern Virginia, new American suburbs tend to be disappointments, if not outright failures. Traffic jams are regularly as bad as anything in the fearsome, loathsome city. Waste problems can be worse. Boundaries are ill defined; town centers are nonexistent. Too often, there's no there there.
The critique is not new. Until recently, however, nearly all the dissidents have sneered and carped from on high, dismissing not just the thoughtless, ugly way suburbs have developed, but also the very hopes and dreams of those who would live there. Today, for the first time, the most articulate, ! convincing critics of American suburbia are sympathetic to suburbanites and are proposing a practical cure.
For more than a decade, Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, a Miami- based husband-and-wife team of architects and planners, have been reinventing the suburb, and their solution to sprawl is both radical and conservative: they say we must return to first principles, laying out brand- new towns according to old-fashioned fundamentals, with the locations of stores, parks and schools precisely specified from the outset, with streets that invite walking, with stylistic harmony that avoids the extremes of either architectural anarchy or monotony.
Duany and Plater-Zyberk are no pie-in-the-sky theorists, but deeply pragmatic crusaders who barnstorm the country, lecturing, evangelizing, designing, bit by bit repairing and redeeming the American landscape. So far the couple and their colleagues have proposed, at the behest of developers, more than 30 new towns ranging from Tannin, a 70-acre hamlet in Alabama, to Nance Canyon, a 3,050-acre, 5,250-unit New Age town near Chico, Calif. Half a dozen such towns are already under construction. Seaside, their widely publicized prototype town in northern Florida, is more than half built. At Kentlands, a new town on the edge of Maryland suburbia outside Washington, the first families have just moved in, and vacant lots are selling despite the housing slump. In addition, the two, among the Prince of Wales' favorite architects, have helped design a town Charles plans to build in Dorset.