Ecomunicipality.com

We all know the story (or should): post World War II, lots of baby-boom families getting started, Leavittown, New York, cheap land, cookie-cutter homes, safe sub-divisions, a lot of road-building, new schools, new municipal governments. A whole new American Dream with profits galore.

Welcome to America's suburb. Land of enchantment, of dreams, of the perfect American experience. Clean. Ordered. Safe. Affluent.

I've never had the pleasure to live in one, though I did, as a teacher, work in one for a decade.

Well, the suburb has come in for a lot of criticism over the last several decades. From the atomizing effects of its single unit, single lot, single family approach to housing, to its consumption of massive amounts of land and habitat, to its wasteful dependence upon fossil fuel as a premise for its existence.

Now the question becomes is the suburb a thing of the past? New studies and new thinking suggest that it is.