An example of urban sprawl in Tyson's Corner, Va.

It has been estimated that the city of Phoenix is expanding into the surrounding Arizona desert at the rate of one acre per hour.

One result of this megasprawl is that homeowner satisfaction is short-lived. People who buy homes in "edge developments" with the expectation that they will be viewing unspoiled natural scenery from their family-room windows soon find that they are surrounded by other suburban houses. Ironically, most sprawl is created by people trying to escape sprawl.

Nor is suburban sprawl confined to the wide open spaces of the American West. Between 1970 and 1990, Cleveland expanded by one-third, despite the fact that its population actually declined. New York City has engendered an archipelago of bedroom communities marching straight across New Jersey and into Pennsylvania.

The problem with most suburban development, critics point out, is that it is designed around the car, and thus is a disaster both socially and aesthetically. Broad swaths of blacktop leading to two- or three- car garages are the most conspicuous design element of the typical suburban house, while streets are built wide to accommodate auto traffic, but are often devoid of pedestrians.

Most families do their shopping at the mall -- another car- centered environment -- and commute long distances to their jobs, thus increasing air pollution and other environmental problems. Socially, the reliance on car travel frequently results in the death of urban commercial centers, and consequently in the death of civic culture.

One of the few finished New Urbanist communities is Seaside on Florida's Gulf Coast, which Newsweek has dubbed, perhaps a bit facetiously, "probably the most influential resort community since Versailles."

Approximately 10 years ago, a group of architects and urban planners launched a movement aimed at countering suburban sprawl. Called "the New Urbanism," the movement has produced numerous theoretical and polemical works, and a handful of actual communities based on its principles of planning and design.

Through their organization, Congress for the New Urbanism, the movement's leaders have promoted development patterns modeled on traditional, mixed-use, walkable towns as an antidote to sprawl and as a means to foster community. Their advocacy of and building of such places seems to have generated more public interest than any design movement in recent memory.

This movement will be the focus of a conference at the Graduate School of Design (GSD), March 4-6. "Exploring the (New) Urbanism" will bring together many of the movement's most important theorists and practitioners, along with faculty from the GSD and other design schools, practicing architects and urban planners, lawyers, architectural critics, social scientists, and mayors of major American cities.

"The claims by proponents of the New Urbanism are grand; some would say grandiose, some would say inspirational. But as with any new idea, the proof is in the pudding, that is, in the examples that have come out. And I think at this point, it's too early to tell," said Jerold Kayden, GSD associate professor of urban planning and moderator of a panel discussion on "Law/Code/Policy."

Kayden's wait-and-see attitude, typical of many in the design profession, is an understandable response in view of the fact that so few New Urbanist communities have actually been built, while those that have are still very much in a state of evolution.

One of the few finished New Urbanist communities is Seaside on Florida's Gulf Coast, which Newsweek has dubbed, perhaps a bit facetiously, "probably the most influential resort community since Versailles."

Seaside, designed by the husband-and-wife team of Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk (both of whom will be participating in the GSD conference, along with Robert Davis, the town's developer), embodies most of the New Urbanist design ideas.

The town is small and compact, permitting residents and visitors to walk to stores and other public places. Streets are narrow to slow down vehicular traffic and encourage pedestrian use. Houses are close together without the spacious front lawns that have become such a fetish in suburban communities. Instead, porches are positioned near the street, encouraging neighbors to interact in a way that suburbia's private, fenced-in backyards do not easily permit.

The quaint and cozy streets of Seaside received additional visibility last year as the location for the movie The Truman Show, a film about a man who has spent his life in a vast stage set without realizing it. Many of Seaside's residents feel that director Peter Weir's depiction of their town as a place of unreal and sinister perfection is an unfair distortion of reality, but the movie does point to a problem that many critics of New Urbanism have addressed: its artificiality and remoteness from the real issues of American communities.

"I'm a skeptic," said Alan Altshuler, the Ruth and Frank Stanton Professor in Urban Policy and Planning. "Not about the attractiveness of New Urbanist small communities, but about the power of the movement to have any significant impact on the problem of urban sprawl."

Most New Urbanist communities, Altshuler points out, are themselves located in suburban areas, making them high-density pockets within the very suburban sprawl their creators criticize. New Urbanist theorists have promoted schemes to restructure or "infill" existing urban neighborhoods, but these plans are often stalemated due to economic and legal impediments. In the end, it is easier to build on new land, even if that can be seen as compromising the movement's original principles.

The movement is also fairly small, though generating a lot of media attention. Celebration, the town in Florida constructed by the Disney Corp., is responsible for much of this attention, although most of the New Urbanists are hesitant to embrace the settlement as a true embodiment of their ideas.

Most of the New Urbanist towns that do exist are populated mostly by upper-middle-class residents, few of whom fulfill the movement's dream of working within their community. In terms of numbers, New Urbanism has had only a fraction of the impact of the gentrification movement of the 1970s and '80s. "And that didn't really change the nature of metropolitan areas," Altshuler said, but "just provided another option."

Matt Kiefer, an attorney with the Boston firm of Goulston & Storrs, who has worked extensively in the area of land use law and was a Loeb Fellow at the GSD in 1995-96, agreed with Altshuler that New Urbanist communities might be seen as little more than "a kinder, gentler kind of sprawl."

But Kiefer, who will be taking part in the conference, believes that on the whole the debate the New Urbanists have introduced has been beneficial. "They have added a more humane element to the vocabulary for thinking about planning and land use," he said. "Cities have been victimized by bad planning in the past, and New Urbanism offers an alternative to this by focusing on people."

Alex Krieger, chariman of the GSD's Department of Urban Planning and Design and organizer of a conference about the New Urbanism movement on March 4-6, agrees that the principles espoused by the New Urbanists are "unassailable," but he is critical of the movement's propensity to be seen as a panacea, a simple formula for curing the ills of society.

Alex Krieger, chairman of the GSD's Department of Urban Planning and Design and the organizer of the conference, agrees that the principles espoused by the New Urbanists are "unassailable," but he is critical of the movement's propensity to be seen as a panacea, a simple formula for curing the ills of society.

"What concerns me is that New Urbanism is eminently co- optable by developers who will use those ideas to produce a new and slightly better version of the suburbs," Krieger said, adding that there are already examples of subdivisions advertised as "New Urbanist" on the basis of a few superficial architectural details.

Nor is Krieger against building better suburbs. But what he is leery of is the prospect of New Urbanism becoming a media and marketing juggernaut that will take the emphasis off of the much more urgent need to revitalize older urban and first-tier suburban areas that offer little to entice middle-class homebuyers.

"Roxbury, for example, has all the stuff that New Urbanists claim to like -- population density, narrow streets, front porches, etc. -- and, in population, it's the equivalent of about 90 Seasides, but nobody's holding it up as an ideal or clamoring to get in. Americans have always been better at replacing things, or starting anew, than in working hard to improve the places that already exist."

The purpose of the conference, Krieger said, is not to debunk New Urbanism, but to examine the movement and "nudge it toward broader alternatives, possibilities, insights." Krieger said that because of the GSD's past history, it has a special responsibility to take on this role.

"When Walter Gropius was dean of the Design School, we were at the epicenter of a particular view of urbanism that was itself offered as a panacea, a single-minded way to approach planning, which is now largely discredited," he said.

That view, which exalted the stark, unadorned, straight-sided building as the essence of modernism, led directly to the "urban renewal" movement of the 1950s and '60s, producing many of the low-income projects which now, plagued by drugs, crime, and violence, are held up as examples of how not to design urban housing or create neighborhoods.

"At the GSD, we are particularly sensitive to the dangers of jumping on a bandwagon and promoting a universal solution to the problem of making communities," said Krieger. "The problems are very complex. There are many different kinds of settlements, each with its own character and set of needs. What I hope the conference accomplishes is to focus attention not just on a new urbanism, but on urbanisms."