New Urbanism is official. Not merely a transitory fashion or a conceptual aesthetic, the publishing of Emily Talen's work New Urbanism & American Planning: The Conflict ofCultures ensures that from now on even those criti­ cal of the hybridized, resurgent neo-traditionalism of the Congress for the New Urbansim will have to acknowledge them, just as the New Urban­ ists today have to acknowledge the Congres Internationaux d'Architecture Modern. Talen, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, has created the type of book that can be found in the canon of every trend­ turned-movement: a reframing of history which places the ideology of the converted at the end of the tale. Yet, while New Urbanist writers may have a well earned reputation for placing polemics over research and romance over history, in this book Talen makes a considerable contribution to the field of planning - regardless of what one thinks of Seaside, Florida. The reason for this has to do with the scope of her subject, which is not New Urbanism but rather American urbanism, and in framing the topic this way the author grants herself ample intellectual room to explore.

Search a well-stocked library or bookstore for works on urban form and you might reach the same conclusion drawn by Robert Bruegmann: "Most of what has been written about sprawl to date has been written about com­ plaints" (p. 3). But what separates Bruegmann, a professor of art history, architecture, and urban planning at the University of Illinois at Chicago, from most people is what he does next. "[S]o many 'right-minded' people were so vociferous on the subject that I began to suspect that there must be something suspicious about the argument itself" (p. 8). The result of this questioning is a work lauded by Alexander Garvin on the book's jacket as no less than "the most important book on the American landscape since Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities". This surprisingly ebullient endorsement from one of the most public personalities in city planning should make us all take notice.