ABSTRACT
The American Dream is changing fast. Midcentury's secular creed—the quest for a pastoral suburban home—didn't last long. The suburb is now synonymous with sprawl, social disconnection, and environmental degradation. Suburbanites are now demanding growth boundaries, greenbelts, and land trusts. And search for a replacement dream is under way, with sole candidate for both city and suburb a "new urbanism"—housing and neighborhoods that are more compact, walkable, diverse, neighborly, close to necessary shopping, accessible by public transit—that stresses human connection and life patterns with less environmental damage.
But new urbanist reconstruction requires extensive public action: expanded public regulation of economic development and land use (like growth boundaries); and increased taxation to create public goods including open space, transit, parks, town centers, historic and environmental restoration, access to the "specially abled," poverty reduction, and more, which arouses fierce elite and corporate opposition, indeed overpowering threats by global/mobile firms to relocate or take other measures lethal to workers and community should increased regulation 256or taxation be imposed. So up to now growth limitation measures and the new urbanism have had no teeth and meager funds. The United States is still suburbanizing, indeed leapfrogging out, but no longer from conviction and sense of grace, but rather because commercial power immobilizes the popular forces necessary to gain the resources to reconstruct.
But if mobile/agile capital has the upper hand, its ecologically and socially destructive trajectory will intensify. Critique, yearnings, and search for alternatives will not be extinguished, and many of the experiments provide inspiration for what could be done. Thus, for the foreseeable future, struggles to save the cities—actually whole regions—will generate local activism and starkly and vividly raise progressive alternatives requiring public goods to the rule of wealth and market.
