You came here for life to be different. But that makes the whole issue seem sentimental, as if it were merely a matter of losing Nedick's for McDonald's, or worrying that the uniform taste of the Pottery Barn will drive out the eccentric shops of the East Village. Actually, those are really just lifestyle issues. What is troubling about the New Suburbanization goes deeper than that. The real question is what kind of physical place a more suburbanized city becomes, and what kind of community that physical place creates.
Most suburbs now have even less truly public space than they once did.
It's the older, villagelike suburbs that have parks, not the newer ones. These communities exist to exclude, whereas cities traditionally existed to include, or at least had the effect of inclusion. We have stopped valuing the street, which is the essential building block of any real city. And you have a recipe for the kind of disengagement and alienation that characterizes so many communities victimized by suburban sprawl. But there is a huge difference between the Rockefeller Plaza skating rink, which feels like a public place, and the Trump Tower shopping atrium, which in spite of its pretension to urban sophistication is a sterilized retreat from city streets.