Suburban Nation

An excellent resource for anyone wishing to learn more about the flaws of suburban living is the book Suburban Nation. It manages to address concerns objectively, yet manages to stay away from a blatant environmental agenda, and avoids direct association with the New Urbanism movement.

By the way, The Congress for the New Urbanism, in my simplistic understanding, is a fairly radical group calling for a moratorium on all road and airport improvements, a halt on all sprawl development, and an immediate turn to urban-style development. Their motivation seems to be more along environmentalism, and their methods are too ambitious to be effective.

I think we need to work more in the realm of shaping public opinion, and speak with a pragmatic bias. The environmental lobby still has a stigma about it, what with its methods of stopping sprawl to save some subspecies no one has ever heard of and agressive lawsuits with dubious grounds. Instead, if people understand how various types of development and living affect them directly, we can more effectively shape opinions.