Building up the Burbs; The suburbs are the world's future because most people love them, so why fight the sprawl?(Cover story)

Byline: Joel Kotkin (Kotkin is an Irvine Senior Fellow with the New America Foundation and author of "The City: A Global History" (2005).)

Sorry, city sophisticates, but the metropolis of the future may prove far less intensely urban than you hope. For all the focus on trendy downtowns and skyscrapers, the real growth in jobs and population is likely to take place on the periphery. The new urbanism, built around downtown revival and beloved by the celebrated starchitects, will cede pride of place to the "new suburbanism." And not only in the land of free-ranging suburbs, America.

In contrast to the powers who fight "sprawl," advocates of the new suburbanism focus on ways to make the periphery work better. It's about bringing business and jobs, not just bedrooms, to the outer rings, and reviving main streets in smaller towns and cities, not just in major urban centers. In some senses, the new suburbanism seeks to recover the ideals of early advocates of decentralization such as the early-20th-century British visionary Ebenezer Howard, who proposed dispersing populations into largely self-sustaining "garden cities."

Correcting the problems of suburbia is an international imperative. Almost everywhere, cities tend toward sprawl, more like much-maligned Los Angeles than like Manhattan, the urbanist's heaven. This pattern owes largely to the preference of the middle and working classes for privacy and space--choices ridiculed as boringly bourgeois by urban theorists. "L.A. is the realization of every immigrant's dream--the vassal's dream of his own castle," observed the Italian-born, Los Angeles-based urbanist Edgardo Contini in the 1960s. "Europeans who come here are delighted by our suburbs. Not to live in an apartment! It is a universal aspiration to own your own home." Today, surveys find that 70 to 80 percent of Americans prefer a single-family home and only 15 percent, an apartment in a dense urban area.

These preferences are increasingly universal. In Europe, Canada, Japan and Australia, growth is spilling out of urban centers, even in places that boast extensive mass-transit systems. In London, the center has been losing population since at least the 1960s. As H. G. Wells predicted a century ago, much of southern and central England is a vast suburb of the capital. In Frankfurt, the suburbs now reach out as far as 80 kilometers and in Paris, the center is losing about 1 percent of its population annually as businesses and the middle class move out past the heavily immigrant banlieues. In Japan, too, high prices and congestion have propelled an exodus: between 1970 and 1995, 10 million people settled in suburbs around the main cities of the Kanto Plain, including Tokyo, Yokohama and Kawasaki.

The impulse of many authorities is to try to stop sprawl and the problems (particularly overdependence on cars and malls) it brings. Planners in cities from Sydney to Portland, Oregon, have imposed "anti-sprawl" strategies that attempt to force people back into dense concentrations. Sydney's strict land-use regime, now under attack from both the political left and right, is helping drive up home prices--and drive young families to less highly regulated Australian cities. In Portland, a similar campaign is pushing development beyond the reach of city planners, across the Columbia River to Washington state.

In contrast, the new ...