SACRAMENTO, CA -- The hottest thing in urban thinking today is something called the "New Urbanism." It is
possible to summarize this idea as the view that America was a better place when porches were in the
front and garages in the back of houses, instead of the other way around as they are in most suburban
subdivisions today. Many traditionalist conservatives such as Russell Kirk made this point over 40 years ago,
and classical liberals could easily join forces with New Urbanists in attacking the stifling government
regulations that have prevented people from building "neotraditional" neighborhoods.

But alas, the New Urbanists all too often betray an animus toward the suburbs that makes you suspect that,
given enough power, they would not hesitate to engage in unlimited social engineering to make us all better
people. At their frothiest, New Urbanists sound like the Swedish social engineers of the 1960s and 1970s,
who used housing policy and planning regulations for the purpose of properly "socializing" Swedish citizens.

In his new book Cities in Civilization, Sir Peter Hall recounts just how loony the Swedish Social Democrats were in their heyday. He cites Lennart Holm, director general of the Directorate of National Planning in the 1970s, who said: "Estates of small houses are bad. They encourage social stratification, and this is what we want to avoid . . . We cannot allow this to continue . . . We cannot allow people to preserve their differences. People will have to give up the right to choose their own neighbors."

Or try out Jan Stromdahl, architect with the Directorate: "I am afraid of living in a detached house, because it causes isolation, and restricts contact. I am interested in collective living, and want to see it spread." For full disclosure, few can top Ingrid Jussil, town planning expert with the Ministry of the Interior and a Social Democratic Party ideologist: "Town planning must emphasize the collective. We can achieve this by breaking down barriers, and forcing people into contact with each other. In that way, we can, for example, socialize
children early. Society has got to decide how children are going to live."

The eminent American political scientist Hugh Heclo commented: "To the Social Democrats, housing policy was
essentially a question of deciding what kinds of citizen the policy should help produce. As emphasized
by one leading party official, homeownership in any form threatened to make Swedes preoccupied with their
own private concerns . . . Politically they fear--and their fears were realized in 1976--that a suburban
Sweden would become a bourgeois Sweden with a bourgeois government."

Despite the earnest attempts of the Swedes to generate an anti-suburban nation, Swedes flocked to the
detached-house suburbs just like Americans. Such an agenda won’t work here any better. Under the old rule
of logic that who says A must say B, it is not unreasonable to wonder whether the consequent logic of
the more frothy New Urbanists isn’t something rather like Swedish-style social engineering. I like many New
Urbanist community design ideas, but I’d welcome a disavowal of ambitions to create the New Urban citizen.

--By Steven Hayward