HOME FROM NOWHERE: Remaking Our Everyday World for the Twenty-First Century.

By James Howard Kunstler. Simon & Schuster. 318 pp. $24

No one who is concerned about the spread of suburban sprawl in the United States can avoid paying serious attention to the New Urbanist movement--and to this manifesto by one of its leading publicists. Everyone complains about sprawl, but only these architects and planners know what to do about it: build main streets (not malls), with adjoining residential streets organized in something like a grid, houses placed close together and close to the street, and plenty of green spaces. In a word, towns.

Kunstler, the author of eight novels and one previous nonfiction book, has a weakness for bombast--is it really true that "we have become, by sheer inertia, a nation of overfed clowns, crybabies, slackers, deadbeats, sadists, cads, whores, and crooks"? But he is also clever and persuasive, never more so than when explaining why the contemporary American suburb breeds such a strong, if vague, "dis-ease." Simply allowing people to walk to their destinations rather than drive, he argues, would be "spiritually elevating.... When neighborhoods are used by pedestrians, a much finer scale of detailing inevitably occurs. Building facades become more richly ornamented and interesting. Little gardens and windowboxes appear.... In such a setting, we feel more completely human."

We need not share Kunstler's conviction that bad design is the chief cause of eroding American communities to recognize that it is one of the causes--and one of the few we have the power to influence directly through law. The community zoning ordinance is the genetic code of the modern suburb, making it virtually impossible to build the kinds of towns we once erected as a matter of course. As Kunstler points out, today's zoning codes leave no alternative to the one-story strip mall, with its huge setbacks from the street, forbidding parking lots, and absence of apartments over stores. Financing is another impediment: banks are reluctant to back anything but conventional sprawl development. Forget about building a new Main Street; it's both illegal and prohibitively expensive.

Kunstler does not seem to expect the New Urbanism to succeed on its own merits. But he does suggest that a return to towns and cities may eventually be forced by the end of cheap gasoline. Ironically, the Disney Corporation, which comes in for some abuse in this book, exhibits more faith than Kunstler in the possibility of selling the idea to the American public. The much-hyped new town of Celebration that Disney is building in Orlando, Florida, is practically a textbook example of New Urbanist construction.