Architecture Magazine

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.