Not-So-Grand Plan.

• Author: Peyser, Tom
• Position: Review

The New City, by Stephen Amidon, New York: Doubleday, 445 pages, $24.95

In 1971, when novelist Stephen Amidon was 12 years old, he moved with his family from suburban New Jersey to Columbia, Maryland, a "model town" founded on the idea that comprehensive, centralized city planning opened the royal road to improved quality of life. According to Amidon, Columbia was a "social experiment, a city where poor, rich, black and white were supposed to commingle in near-perfect harmony." Looking back on it now, he sees the city, with its "dizzying, naive optimism," as "a distillation of the country's values and recent history." Amidon's lumbering new novel The New City is clearly based in part on his teenage impressions of Columbia. (The book's press kit includes the autobiographical statement I just quoted.) That being the case, we have to conclude that he finds the country's avowed values fraudulent and its recent history a disaster. Although Amidon seems unusually determined--even for a young American novelist--to believe the very worst of the United States, his latest book is worth tak ing seriously, if only because it reflects many fundamental attitudes of the disaffected in the generation that will be taking over soon.

As its title suggests, The New City tries to capture the emergence of a new way to plan social space. Set in the early '70s, its action unfolds at the moment that ideas now associated with "the New Urbanism" started taking shape as a leading orthodoxy. The New Urbanism is the planning establishment's attempt to atone for the disasters it wrought in the name of urban renewal and related movements. (See "Dense Thinkers," January 1999.)

In older cities, its advocates foster the creation of the kind of high-density, multiuse neighborhoods that their predecessors razed to make room for immense housing projects and downtown arteries (this time, say the planners, we'll get it right). In new developments, like the one depicted in The New City, New Urbanists try to combat what they see as the baleful influence of "sprawl," which they dislike more for ideological reasons than for pragmatic ones. What they call sprawl, after all, is often the market's way of responding to the large number of people who want a house on a bit of land (which is inevitably cheaper on the outskirts of developed areas). But that means that these people will drive en famille to the store, the school, and the dentist, instead of doing the virtuous, democratic thing...