As US population grows inexorably toward 300 million, there are two visions for the future of American towns and cities. Although very different, each seeks to create a sense of community, a sense of place where none existed before.

One focuses on downtown areas - often run-down, sometimes left as polluted industrial "brownfields." This new kind of urban renewal is seen in places like the trendy Pearl district in Portland, Ore.

The other vision - the most dominant one - is found among the tile-roofed homes mushrooming outward from the nation's fastest-growing city, Gilbert, Ariz., a Phoenix suburb...

Get used to it, says demographic trend-watcher Joel Kotkin.

"The sprawl is going to happen," he says. "You've got 100 million new people [since the US topped 200 million in 1967], they've got to go somewhere, and most don't want to live in the city. End of story."

Public opinion bears this out. Just 13 percent want to live in a city, 51 percent in a suburb, 35 percent in a rural community, according to a 2004 survey by the National Association of Realtors and a group called Smart Growth America.

"If you look at the survey data, even the nice cities are losing population," says Mr. Kotkin. "It's San Francisco, Boston, and Minneapolis, not just Cleveland and Philadelphia. The population growth of even the most robust cities is much less than the surrounding areas..."

The key question, says Kotkin, is: "Do we manage this growth in an intelligent way and figure out how to make it environmentally benign?"

"The other way is to try and become like Europe, stop having babies and stop having immigrants, and become kind of a museum society," says Kotkin, who extols the economic and social virtues of what he calls the "new suburbanism." "That is not in the nature of Americans."

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