One man's vision for the suburban future

The image of suburbia has taken it on the chin in recent years. It's been painted as dysfunctional - feeding sprawl, auto dependency, and isolation.

While planning consultant Tom Martinson doesn't dismiss the criticisms, he is a great believer in suburban living and sees brighter days ahead.

Not long ago, Mr. Martinson, a city-planning consultant and urban historian, wrote a book that expresses his views: "American Dreamscape: the Pursuit of Happiness in Postwar Suburbia" (Carroll & Graf, $26). When contacted by phone at his home in Edina, Minn., a suburb of Minneapolis, he further addressed the subject.

Too often, Martinson believes, roads have been "demonized" as the enemy of suburbia, when the real need is for better transportation planning. In particular, he advocates greater reliance on a network of parkways than on freeways. "This strikes me as more humane," he says.

Parkways, such as the beautiful, wooded roadways that lace Minneapolis, make driving more pleasurable, he's convinced.

In Martinson's analysis, the need is to better connect outlying communities, rather than be blinded by the distance of suburbs from downtowns.

These downtowns, he says, are often specialty niche centers. They may attract office workers, yet more jobs are now in the suburbs, and it's possible that many suburbanites are more interested in driving to neighboring towns than visiting the big city.

The challenge for planners and designers, Martinson says, is to think in terms of creating livable regions, not single cities. This could bring a new generation of talented young designers to the table.

"Maybe they're going to say," he conjectures, " 'Hey, here's something the older guys haven't touched for 50 years. This is a wide-open field. I'm going to get into it and see what's available.' I hope that's happening right now. I expect it is."

In what he considers an important precursor to change, discontent with existing suburbs is growing.

For the most part, he sees it expressed in bumper-sticker advocacy of "smart growth" and "sprawl is bad" rhetoric.

"I'm thrilled to hear this, because it tells me lots of people - politicians, opinion leaders, ordinary citizens, and so forth - are starting to articulate that something is wrong," he says. "The fact that they may not have solutions yet isn't bad. In fact, you have to go through this early discontent stage before ever moving into what we really do about it. I have boundless optimism that we will inevitably deal with this."

As an urban historian, he realizes that widespread suburban development in the US has enjoyed a longer run than most imagine, with several formative waves occurring in the 1800s. Yet what has happened since World War II, he says, is "really brand-new in the context of world civilization, or even American urbanism."

The mass migration to new subdivisions is still playing out today, and remains a work in progress.

What concerns Martinson is how limited the current discussion seems, and how driven it is by the advocates of New Urbanism and traditional neighborhood design, who emphasize mixed-use, higher density, walkable communities.

While not objecting to the retro visual charm of such places, he wonders if their attempts to encourage sidewalk social interaction and dictate every last design detail really interest middle- and lower-income Americans.

The urbanists take their cues from cities and are often geographically concentrated in East and West Coast metropolitan areas.

"There aren't many people writing either as suburbanites or from the Midwest," says Martinson, who acknowledges a populist bias on the subject.

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