Paradoxically, many U.S. metropolitan areas are both recovering from their transformation into sprawling edge cities (the new light-rail plans to promote densication in cities and curtail automobile use in large cities of the Midwest and Southwest attest to this) and also dysfunctionally growing without regard to the broader ecological niche they inhabit. In terms of architectural style, we can track the two trends through the transformation of the modern shopping center. By the mid-1990s the postwar, state-nanced modernist city, with its “degree zero” planning, had given way to new alliances between public resources and private proteering, leading to both the gigantic version of the shopping center, the megamall-that intense, island of entertainment in an asphalt ocean-and the new urbanist version, the privatized simulation of a prewar town commons. Overall

in the United States, public space has been increasingly privatized in the neoliberal economic order of the last few decades.1 American urban critics warn that even in Europe, the source of modern city design, where neither the scale of commercialization nor the scope of modernist urban renewal ever reached what it did in the United States, a “McWorld” of urban transformation is not long in coming.