Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream Book

This is interesting as a snapshot of New Urbanism at the tail end of the twentieth century, but parts have not aged well. I enjoyed the first half, which diagnosed the problems of sprawl, more than the last half, which offers solutions that often come across as more dogmatic than evidence-supported. The authors are clearly very proud of their planned communities, which they refer to frequently as case studies, but seventeen years after publication it's less clear that those artificial neighborhoods achieved all they strove for. And while they speak frequently of the importance of urban infill and rehabilitation, the meteoric rise of inner city housing values seems to have outpaced their wildest dreams, leaving much of what they have to say about the truly urban environment feeling dated.