Suburban Nation
The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream
by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck
North Point, 289 pp., $ 30
 
Picture Windows
How the Suburbs Happened
by Rosalyn Baxandall and Elizabeth Ewen
Basic, 298 pp., $ 27.50

The Old Town section of Alexandria, Virginia, just across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C., is about as close to utopia as it gets for devotees of traditional communities and critics of suburban sprawl. It’s a lovely example of “mixed use” zoning — shops, offices, homes are interspersed — and a monument to late eighteenth-century American architecture. Its streets are tree-lined and narrow, forcing cars to move slowly. The buildings are low-rise and close to the street. It’s both pedestrian-friendly and accessible to mass transit. Old Town Alexandria is “a unique place to visit to engage in civilized activity,” insist Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck, three widely respected urban planners whose new book, Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream, is the most coherent and important attack on American sprawl to appear so far.