The battle's over. For half a century, legions of planners, urbanists, environmentalists and big city editorialists have waged war against sprawl. Now it's time to call it a day and declare a victor.

The winner is, yes, sprawl.

The numbers are incontestable and the trends inexorable. Since 1950, more than 90 percent of U.S. metropolitan population growth has taken place in the suburbs. Roughly two out of three people in the nation's metro areas are suburban dwellers. "The 'burbs" have become the homeland of American success, with an increasing share of our national wealth and half the poverty of the urban core.

Suburban bliss

We may continue to decry them and make fun of them, in cynical movies like American Beauty or on spoofy television shows like Desperate Housewives, but we've made them our home. For most of us, they represent both our present and our future. Over the next quarter century, according to a Brookings Institution study, the nation will add 50 percent to the current stock of houses, offices and shops -the great majority taking place in lower-density locations, not traditional inner cities.

Once we acknowledge this reality, we can turn to the task of making the best of it. In terms of space, quality of life, safety and privacy, the suburbs have given us much more of what we call the American Dream than cities ever could. What they have failed to do, often miserably, is to live up to their promise of becoming self-contained, manageable communities that can both coexist amiably with the natural environment and offer a sense of identity.

Most students at the architecture school where I teach, like talented young people generally, would rather work in the city, designing cool lofts or arresting high-rise towers, than try to create something in the suburban jumble. But the suburbs are where the action will be in the future. The great challenge of the 21st century, not to mention the main economic opportunity, lies in transforming suburban sprawl into something more efficient, interesting and humane.

The suburbs are becoming ever more ubiquitous. Instead of clustering in large, crowded cities, Americans are building bigger and bigger houses - twice the size of those in 1950 - and doing so increasingly in low-density, low-cost regions such as Orlando, Fla., San Bernardino-Riverside, Calif., Phoenix and Las Vegas, where job growth has also been most robust.

Many in the planning profession and others who bemoan the "cultural wasteland" will find it hard to swallow the reality that the suburbs rule. Others will hold on to the hope that higher oil prices will force more suburbanites back into dense urban cores. But suburbanization proceeded apace during the steep energy price rises of the 1970s; it has also accelerated in Europe and Japan, where energy prices are already sky-high.

Upscale cities

City living won't die; instead, it likely will become, as urban analyst Bill Fulton has put it, primarily a "niche lifestyle" preferred mostly by the young, the childless and the rich.

But just as cities won't prosper if they don't cater to the niche resident, the suburbs must evolve from a pale extension of the city into something more like a self-sustaining archipelago of villages. This concept has its roots in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when visionaries like writer H.G. Wells saw movement to the periphery - what he called the "centrifugal possibilities"- as a bold alternative to the horrors of the contemporary industrial city.

This vision was widely embraced. Friedrich Engels predicted the overthrow of capitalism would lead to the end of the large mega-city and the dispersal of the industrial proletariat into the countryside, delivering the rural population from "isolation and stupor" while finally solving the working class's persistent housing crisis. (next page »)