"Give a man some room to roam," reads a General Motors ad from the 1940s. This was the American Dream, the picket fence utopia. At the end of World War II, Americans hopped in their cars and abandoned their smog-choked cities for greener pastures in suburbia. Now the sprawling concrete canyons of strip malls, abandoned buildings, Orwellian office parks, intersecting freeways, roads, and lanes have robbed the 'burbs of civility. But new urbanists are hatching plans to encourage "smart growth" and rechannel development within local communities. How can they coax the small-town charm of TV sitcoms back into the booming metropolis?

"Sprawl" is defined in a 1998 report from the Sierra Club as "lowdensity, automobile-dependent development beyond the edge of service and employment areas." It's a decades-old side effect of rapid growth and mismanaged land-use, resulting in a string of consequences: traffic snarls and epic commutes, lost open space, increased pollution, higher taxes, and decaying city centers. Sprawl consumes more than two million acres of open space in the US each year, keeping people sequestered in cars, and zoning small-town 'ideals into obscurity.

South Florida suffers from the nation's worst case of sprawl, according to a study by the Brookings Institution, a public policy think tank in Washington. The US median revealed that 30 percent of office space was based in the region's central business district, states the report, which considered data from 1987 to 2002 in 13 large US markets.

Virtually all office growth in the past 15 years has sprouted outside Miami's downtown, which contains the largest percentage of office space (66 percent) located in an "Edgeless City"--a form of small-scale, scattered development that never reached the critical mass. As seen from the air, Miami's peach-toned rows of Monopoly houses and the long, steady roll of skyscrapers are squeezed between Biscayne Bay and the Everglades. As more people flood the area, lured by the promise of living in a sun-dappled postcard, there is no place left to expand.

Kendall, a rambling suburb just southwest of Miami, is a jumble of Lego-block office buildings, mega-sized malls, sweltering parking lots, Potemkin car dealerships, and dingy canals. There's little prospect for Integrating people and businesses into bus and rail transit systems here, where the deserted Metrorail shuttles back and forth on a single line to nowhere. In a 2000 study by the Washingtonbased Surface Transportation Policy Project, South Florida ranked fourth in the nation among regions with the largest percentage (19 percent) of household incomes spent on transportation. Most offices in South Florida are accessible only by car, as opposed to cities such as Washington, DC, which tend to cluster around mass transit loops.

Adeline Smith has lived in her air-conditioned, stuccoed rancher in Whispering Pines for over 30 years. Her neighborhood is a place of manicured lawns, aluminum hurricane shutters and kiddie pools sparkling in the backyard. Smith is a smallish woman whose blue eyes snap with intelligence. She remembers the unnamed 1926 hurricane that pulverized her family's house and forced them to crawl out her bedroom window. When her father built their new home, "Everybody said it looked like a fort. Solid concrete. From the top to the bottom. No boards." Smith talks about the sense of community in Whispering Pines. When the man down the block offered to fix her door, she gave him a zip-locked bag of freshly baked brownies. "Everybody watches out for each other," she says.
On Sundays, she and her best friend, Kay Hrapkowski (who happens to live next door), and Kay's daughter, Frannie, climb in Smith's boatsized Chevy Caprice and run their weekly errands: push shopping carts around Publix, enjoy an early dinner at the local diner, and hurry home before the sky darkens. "We used to go every Sunday down to Homestead," she said referring to the town just south of Whispering Pines. "Well, it's got so much traffic. You have to go down the highway. Now I stay right around here."

Driving is a battleground in South Florida, where yellow lights function more like checkered flags, and miles of cars spill in the same direction. "They see your gray hair and think you're an old fool," she says, letting out a fluttery laugh. Smith remembers when downtown Miami boasted swanky department stores and first-class restaurants, not the limestone clutter and boarded-up businesses that render it a virtual ghost town today.

"We'd go to the movies at the Olympia," Smith says. "Thirty-five cents. It wasn't that far from where we lived, probably five miles. We rode the bus. My father would pick me up. I haven't been on a bus In years."
Smith wrinkles her nose at the suggestion of taking a bus. She prefers the freewheeling independence that a car offers. Hrapkowski agrees, "I don't like to go on a bus. It's too scary. All those men just stare at you." She shudders. "It's slow, and by the time you pick this person up, drop this person off ... it's boring. By that time, I could've gone and come home."
Even if the shops were within walking distance, the ladies wouldn't walk there. "When you get to be my age," Hrapkowski says, shaking her halo of hair, "I walk to the corner and say, 'Let's go back. I'm too tired.'''
Seniors aren't the only ones refusing to give up their driver's licenses. The average American spends $7,633 a year just getting around. Giving up a car means losing freedom of movement, especially since our public transportation system is inferior to that of some third-world countries. Americans are spending between 16 and 20 percent of their take-home pay on transportation. For those among the nation's poorest--many of whom are seniors--up to 40 percent of their income goes to transportation. Part of this stems from people traveling farther distances to reach work. Much of it results from our miserable bus systems, which make a car's personal sanctity seem more attractive.
A study by the Surface Transportation Policy Project found that those who live in New York City, with its fast-moving network of subways and buses, pay the lowest transportation costs in relation to income. Those in transit-deprived places like South Florida pay the highest.
"I think everybody feels we spend too much time in our cars," says Willie Gutierrez. "I work near Tamiami Airport, so I'm going straight west. It's a ten-mile drive. There really isn't any east-west access. Everything else is more north-south and they're all bad." He lists a string of highway hiccups: 95, the Palmetto and the Turnpike. "And they're awful during off-hours. You can drive on a Sunday afternoon and it's still bad."

Like most suburban Floridians, he rarely rides the Metrorail. "Between the time that it takes to drive to the parking place, park the car, and wait for the Metrorail, it has taken us 45 minutes to do what takes less than a half hour in a car," he says. "I can't understand why we don't have a Metrorail to the airport. That would be the ideal if you're traveling." He mentions the efficient subways of Europe, many of which, like the London Underground, link to an airport. "The buses here don't go where people need them [to]. I see a lot of people walking long distances to get their bus." He sighs. "I don't remember the last time I took a bus."

During the 1990s, tank-sized SUVs conquered the automobile market, representing 60 percent of passenger car industry profits. The popular extension of the station wagon (the first car directly marketed to soccer moms), is little more than a "repurposed" assault vehicle, not unlike the nineteenth century British Rovers who bumped and rolled over Africa. Within the enclave of their armored cars, suburbanites prowl_ around like colonial explorers in cities made hostile by negligence.

South Florida recently passed the 17 billion dollar People's Transportation Plan to add 822,000 miles to the existing Metrobus route, operating free for those 65 and older. The Busway Extension to Florida City and US-1 Extension Project are only part of a plan to develop the urban corridor along rural Homestead. Anna Smith (no relation to Adeline), an elementary school teacher from Homestead, drives several miles to work in Richmond Heights and doesn't plan on using public transportation.

"I think it's a good idea for people who don't have vehicles. I'm not going to give up my driving." The bus would be out of the way, she explains. "Colonial Drive is a few miles away from US-1 and I don't think they would have buses that way. Even if they did, I wouldn't use it. I'm set on my car."
Smith occasionally makes use of the Metrorail, which hurls its human cargo to one destination of importance: the county courthouse. "Just looking at the place ... it's really bad," says Smith. "I see a lot of homeless people begging for money."

Victor Gruen, the purported inventor of the enclosed mall, created a chart listing the distance and time, "which the average healthy human being is willing to walk, under varying environmental circumstances." In a tree-lined environment, where the sidewalks are shielded from sun and rain, a person would walk 2,500 feet for ten minutes. In an unattractive environment, such as a parking garage or traffic-clogged street, a person would only walk 600 feet for two minutes.
Downtown Miami is an island of abandoned warehouses and boarded-up storefronts. Derelicts huddle in doorways and kids beg for change at stoplights. All the streets seem to circle in one direction: empty space ringed by parking meters laced with rust. Development has erupted around it and the roads have become an extension of the 1-95 ramps that pour commuters into the area. Homeless men walk hunched and hurried past windstorms of garbage. Pigeons strut around buildings at right angles. On the chalky, untended ground, there's the icy glitter of broken glass.
Another longtime resident of South Florida, George W. Duvall III, a retired lawyer, says, "When we moved down here in '69, I kept asking people, 'Where's downtown Miami?' And they said, 'Flagler street. That's it.' In Maryland, we had downtown Baltimore. We had cities. We knew what they were." His definition of a city? "Department stores, movie houses, markets, big shopping areas, businesses, [and] banks."

In South Florida, we have those things. They're called malls.

Almost every aspect of urban life has been colonized by shopping. Suburbs, schools and even the military are increasingly shaped by shopping spaces. Climate control and escalators have sealed the predatory consumer in an artificial environment so comfortable that nature comes to seem like an interference with commerce. Consider The Falls, a Kendall shopping mall that features wood plank walkways, rustling palms and flower-lined lagoons amid manmade waterfalls. An open-air complex, The Falls offers such popular retail names as Pottery Barn, Bloomingdale's, Abercrombie and Fitch, and Macy's. Inside the newly opened Apple store, iMacs spin on display like robotic sunflowers. Next door, Barney's Coffee offers "flavored milk" (strawberry and peanut butter), as if preparing children for future caffeine intake. Toddlers ride crayon-colored Big Wheels behind dazed-looking mothers. On Halloween, many Florida malls, including the Falls, offer Trick or Treating as a "safe" alternative to neighborhood door-knocking.
In a ruling that declared the shopping mall to be a form of public space, then New Jersey Supreme Court Chief Justice Robert N. Wilentz said, "Shopping malls have replaced the parks and squares that were 'traditionally the home of free speech' ... The economic lifeblood once found downtown has moved to the suburban shopping centers, which have substantially displaced the downtown business districts as the centers of commercial and social activity."
The predominant characteristic of shopping malls is all-inclusiveness. Not only do they offer stores of every shape and size, but open space for many uses. A sign at The Falls encourages this philosophy: "The Falls: It's So You," says the bubbly script, "The task: find the perfect coffee table. The reward: dinner and a movie." Over the crackling PA, the Beach Boys warble "Good Vibrations." Their sugary harmonies cut the air like commercial sound bytes.

"A shopping street has a delicate web of intersecting relationships," said Jonathan Barnett in Urban Design as Public Policy (McGraw-Hili, 1974). "Sever the web in one or two places, and the whole commercial district may die." The landmark Bakery Center, a retail/entertainment project, was demolished and replaced by The Shops at Sunset Place. Intended to be driven by entertainment-oriented retail, the 550,000 sq. ft. center opened in 1998 and is already suffering poor sales.
On weekends, around midnight, the mall's quasi-Mediterranean architecture brings Disney World to mind. Kids sit on the curb-like stones, quiet and hard. They're ditched in the latest counterculture attire. The boys look like tent-legged skateboarders. The girls look like preppy hookers. Slumped in the gutter, waiting for a ride, they sip their baroque iced-coffee drinks and watch the chrome parade wheel around: souped-up Hondas with neon license plates and twenty-four inch rims.
Young people, with their disposable pocket change, make a powerful consumer force. Youth purchases racked up $170 billion last year, almost double the $99 billion they spent in 1994. With no where else to wander, they fill America's cinder block malls as if unraveling off a spool. Sixty-four percent of American kids hang out in malls at least once or twice a week. The mall has become the most common social location in American culture. With only a small amount of parks in Miami--a city of 365,000 people with only 3.5 acres per 1,000 residents--where else can they spend their time?

You won't find many parks in Miami except for those that charge admission. The quality and safety of many public playgrounds is cause for concern. Peter Harnik described this problem in his book, Inside City Parks (Urban Land Institute, 2000). Miami's park staff, short of labor and money, has watched helplessly as its few parks were transformed into a highway depot, a dump site, a sewage treatment plant, a medical center, minimal geometric office buildings, a basketball arena, and Parrot Jungle Island.

"The developers were too greedy," says Les Lynch. He works as an engineer for a manufacturing plant. He was born and raised in South Florida and moved within ten miles of his old house in Suniland. Each day, he drives an hour to work from the Village of Palmetto Bay, with its serene hometown feel, to Medley, a swollen industrial wasteland. "This is where I want to live," he says. "I've seen Miami grow. Now it's just stores and shops. Then the county comes in and says, 'OK, next time you want to build a big development, you have to put in a park.' So, now you have people driving to the parks to ride their bikes."

Near Merrick Place, a new upscale shopping mecca in affluent Coral Gables, a steel and concrete skeleton glints beneath the Metrorail. A sign, blasted by vast, incoherent outlines of graffiti, reads, "Winokur Park." Rusty pairs of knotted swings dangle and an aluminum slide is stippled with dents. There's a tetherball rope, minus the ball, and the faded outline of a volleyball court with no net. Only the basketball hoops appear semi-functional, until the Metrorail whooshes directly overhead with teeth-rattling gusto.

A dark, moping spot of a person meanders toward a concrete bench and sucks on a cigarette. He's the only human in sight. Not long ago, a thirteen-year-old girl was raped in this park. Only a block away, Merrick Place beckons high-class shoppers with anchor stores like Neiman Marcus and Nordstrom.

Women peer in the windows, gawking at pointless kitchen appliances. Their purse-sized dogs clip alongside them. Others sit at outdoor cafes, stabbing at Caesar salads and slurping lobster bisque. Inside Merrick Place, the double-decker stores offer the usual bling: Rolex watches, Burberry umbrellas and a $24,000 Vertu phone that comes with a concierge service.
Near the escalators, modern art pieces loom on display, just beside the bold-faced signs screaming, "Sale!" Since 1992, museum store space in the U.S. has increased 25 percent, while gallery space has increased only three percent. As malls start to look more like museums, it's harder to tell the difference between them. "Portal," Charles Parkhill's sculpture of polished wood, sits near the clothing racks as a piece of intellectual abstraction.

More eye-catching are the strings of cascading butterflies suspended from the ceiling. No artist designed them. The butterfly mobile was the mall's idea, along with the grand piano bubbling jazz in the lobby.

Dadeland Station on US 1 in Kendall is touted as the first vertical shopping center in the US. Jeff Berkowitz has gone where no retail developer has gone before in Miami--up--in one of South Florida's highest density markets. Other multi-level shopping centers feature surface parking, but Dadeland Station sports a six level, 1,460-space parking lot integrated into the retail complex. Shoppers can stroll off one of its three huge, neon-trimmed elevators, large enough to accommodate nine shopping carts, and roll their carts straight to their cars.

This location, known as "the golden triangle," is transforming into "Downtown Dadeland," an urban retail and residential village with wide, shady streets, restaurants, cafes, and retail shopping. In a year and a half, downtown Kendall will house over 3,000 new condo units, adding nearly 7,000 residents to the area. The biggest draw for this development is the lifestyle it offers. Their ad campaign gushes:
Imagine beginning your day by walking out of your beautifully appointed condominium residence through your private elevator lobby, then stopping at the local cafe for a latte and strolling down a wide, shady street towards the Metro Rail, where you board and relax for the short trip to your place of work. "A lot of these redevelopment efforts are looking into doing stuff like that," says Rob Morrison, a political writer in South Florida. "They're making it more accessible and friendly to the eye. And it makes sense." Not every suburbanite wants to live in a condo. "The vertical thing is all good and dandy on the beach," he says. "But they don't really like it out [out in the suburbs]. So it keeps rolling onward."

The consequences may ripple across sprawling Dade County. The plan is one of the first large-scale suburban centers to prioritize people over automobiles. With its pedestrian-friendly design, residents could conduct most of their daily activities within the area. The concept creates a sense of community, nudging buildings up to the street, framing them into boulevards lined with arcades. Where seas of asphalt once covered acres of pricey real estate, structured parking garages would wrap around apartments and shops.

These concepts follow a design movement called "new urbanism." However, most of the planning ideas behind new urbanism are not new. Many of our older, best-loved cities have been carefully planned. Economically diverse, pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods are what distinguish new urbanism from other development styles. Their architects and planners are continuing to shape new communities, now under construction in most states in the US.

Greater density isn't necessarily a bad thing. Randall Robinson, who facilitates the Alliance For Reliable Transport at Miami Beach, says, "Zero lot line homes are seen as a sin by a lot of people, when in fact, that's part of the answer. If the American Dream is a single-family detached house with grass on all four sides, then you're going to have to deal with the problems of traffic that come with suburbia."

It's just a matter of time before any spot in the "countryside" changes into "real estate." This angst-addled progression seems inescapable. But this is an illusion, the result of choices made in a time when cars were seen as heralds of progress rather than ozone-sucking pollutants. And since we made those choices, we can alter them, or else we can lie down and wait for the concrete to brush our skin.

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Man-Made Landscape (New York: Free Press, 1994).
Koolhaas, Rem & Stephana Boerl & Sanford Kwinter. Mutations. Harvard Project
on the City (Barcelona: Actar Editorial, 2001).