For the better part of the past 50 years, urbanists, planners, and environmentalists have railed against suburbia and the dreaded trend of "sprawling" outward from old city cores. Wistfully, some have predicted the imminent doom of the outer ring, first during the energy crisis of the 1970s. Today's more rabid opponents of sprawl, like author James Howard Kunstler, see this as the time "to get out of suburbia while you can," foreseeing the decline of this much-detested American way of life. Others focus their sights on the so-called "booming" market for inner-city housing, predicting a massive wave of young hipsters, emptynesters, and other sophistos, who will help developers package underdeveloped urban stretches of middle America into mini-Manhattans.

Yet in reality, both the notions of suburban decline or a big-time downtown revival are delusional. Since 1950, 93 percent of all metropolitan growth has taken place in the suburbs. More importantly, this pattern continued during the energy crisis and, despite the downtown hype, is showing no real sign of slacking off.

The biggest reason for this triumph is not the "conspiracy" of big oil and freeway builders oft-cited by enviro-activists, but the simple desires of ordinary people -- not only in America but in most rich countries -- to own a piece of land, however humble, where they may live in relative comfort and peace. It reflects what the 1960s Los Angeles urbanist and Italian immigrant Edgardo Contini labeled "the universal aspiration."

This aspiration has not eliminated the traditional urban core so much as greatly circumscribed its relevance. Some cities, like Chicago, retain considerable vibrancy and economic importance. Most others, however, have either collapsed into mere shells of their former selves -- St. Louis, Cleveland, and Buffalo come to mind -- while some, such as Boston and San Francisco, have reinvented themselves as largely ephemeral cities of entertainment and concourse, serving a largely elite, posteconomic constituency.

Facts often prove a significant balm to delusion. Over the last 15 years, some places witnessed a small yet welcome surge in inner-city residents, but, viewed as part of all the new housing units in the country, it remains tiny. In fact, all the growth predicted recently for the 30 top U.S. downtowns through 2010 turns out to be less than half the suburban growth of greater Seattle during the 1990s. And in spite of the recent talk of Houston's downtown housing surge, trends in new permits show that the entire inner ring of the city -- extending well beyond the central core -- accounted for barely 6 percent of the city's total new units, a tiny fraction compared to the outer suburban rings.

Since 2000, these trends seem to be accelerating, according to Brookings Institution demographer William H. Frey. Many cities that are seen as harbingers of a dense urban future -- San Francisco, Chicago, Minneapolis -- have actually lost population since the millennium, following some gains in the 1990s. Hopefully, this decline will reverse in coming years, but even the most optimistic projections for the inner cores are not even remotely close to those on the periphery.

To many urbanists, the rise of suburbia represents the death-knell of the city. Yet if the traditional city has lost its once overpowering relevance, it still has much to teach the suburbs. Sprawl has given people and families a strategy for adapting to urban dysfunction -- antibusiness governments, unworkable schools, lack of green space -- but it has not always addressed other issues adequately, notably the need for community, identity, sacred space, and a closer relation between workplace and home life.

Creating a better suburban future is a noble -- and potentially very profitable -- calling. Suburbia is maturing and evolving all around America, as seen in reviving suburban downtowns such as Naperville, Illinois, or in brash new "suburban villages" being built in places like Houston's Fort Bend County or in California's Santa Clarita Valley. It can be seen in the new arts venues in places like Gwinnett County, Georgia, and in the construction of new and often-striking churches, mosques, synagogues, and temples in the vast periphery.

This critical work will do much to define the 21st-century modern city and to attempt to meet the challenges laid out by the early visionaries of suburbia -- men like Ebenezer Howard or H.G. Wells -- who saw the move to the periphery as a chance to build "a new civilization." And it's a project worthy of the creative energies of architects, environmentalists, and planners -- not their contempt and condemnation.