HOW CITIES WORK: Suburbs, Sprawl, and the Roads Not Taken.

• Author: Greenblatt, Alan
• Position: Brief Article

THE ONLY THING AMERICANS hate worse than sprawl is density. Nobody likes the traffic and the architectural ugliness in and around virtually every metropolitan area in this country, but building on bigger lots and cheaper land remains hard to resist.

Maryland is home to a vaunted smart-growth policy, under which the state refuses to pay for basic infrastructure--water, sewer lines, and roads--m support development outside designated areas. But even there, turning down specific projects that appear to be beneficial has proven tough. Last year, for instance, the state supported construction of a massive new regional mall in Anne Arundel County near Annapolis, even though it despoiled 300 acres of supposedly protected woodland. A top state official told The Washington Post the exemption was understandable because people, including her daughters, "are always going to need somewhere to shop."

Alex Marshall, in his new book How Cities Work, notes that downtowns and other old-fashioned urban environments were all constructed before the advent of the automobile. Since World War II, cities have been a dead art. Given the cost advantages of centralized, car-dependent warehouse-style stores such as Wal-Mart, we aren't likely to build a new Paris anytime soon.

In Marshall's vision, the central fact about cities is always transportation. Believing that building freeways breeds cars, Marshall's goal in this book is to demonstrate how cityscapes are formed by their main transportation systems--the ports that originally shaped New York or the freeway interchanges behind every suburb in America today.

Much of Marshall's book is devoted to case studies of four metropolitan areas. Two of the chapters are a bit weak. He describes the vitality of a Queens neighborhood called Jackson Heights, but doesn't get at the root of why--or how--it works. He's also a bit utopian in his view of Silicon Valley, wishing that area had preserved more apricot orchards through use of mass transit, while ignoring its lack of enthusiasm for such projects.

But his remaining two portraits are highly instructive. Disney's well-covered development of Celebration, Fla., lends ammunition to Marshall's cogent exposure of the lies behind the trendy "New Urbanism." New Urbanists are academics and architects who seek to revive pedestrian-friendly environments by incorporating design elements from classic urban neighborhoods, such as porches and narrow streets, into a suburban neighborhood...