This is a history with many heroes and villains, none of them simple. Unlikely as this may seem today, when the demand for housing exploded after World War II, many people believed that the government should build public rental housing for the newly minted middle class, composed of returning veterans' families. It took hearings presided over by no less a figure than Sen. Joseph McCarthy, along with an extensive public relations campaign by the home-building industry, to enforce the idea that public housing was solely for the destitute and that private homeownership was the American birthright. The result, of course, was that the government subsidized suburban development with cheap mortgages and massive highway projects but left the design and building to rapacious private developers.

Of these, surely none was more influential than William Levitt, "the Henry Ford of housing," in Baxandall and Ewen's apt phrasing. Levitt and Sons pioneered the use of mass-production techniques in home construction, and the $7,999 ranch house they introduced in 1949 -- essentially a Frank Lloyd Wright knockoff designed by Levitt's brother Alfred -- virtually defined the future of suburban architecture. Undeniably, Levitt houses were passably well built and made homeownership affordable for many city dwellers who had never previously imagined it.

But Baxandall and Ewen view the Levittown legacy with what seem to be appropriately mixed emotions. Levitt openly discriminated against blacks and battled against Levittowners' attempts to democratize the town and run it themselves. Levittown's very name came to symbolize dullness and conformity, and as an automobile-based residential community with no downtown it spawned turnpike shopping centers, the ancestors of today's enormous malls. (Architectural Forum magazine called the new shopping centers "markets in the meadows," perhaps inaugurating the suburban language of denial replicated today in all the malls named after the geographical features they have replaced.)

"Picture Windows" is at its best when exploring the experiences of actual suburbanites, both those who felt that life in Levittown and places like it fulfilled their American dream and those who faced much more of a struggle. Baxandall and Ewen's interviews with working-class suburban women, for example, paint a far more varied portrait than the "mad housewife" archetype perpetuated by misogynists and feminists alike. Their compelling chapters on the Long Island towns of Roosevelt and Freeport, loaded with original research, provide an invaluable chronicle of two crucial episodes in the history of suburban integration.

Roosevelt was "blockbusted" in the mid-1960s by real estate speculators who bought houses cheap from terrified whites and resold them at a premium to blacks who were not welcome in most suburbs. Ironically, the result of this fear-mongering and profiteering was a stable community, one of the first middle-class black enclaves in suburban America. When the same tactics were used in nearby Freeport, blacks and whites eventually joined forces to resist blockbusting and white flight. Some of Freeport's methods have been controversial -- the village government has been accused of allowing whites to buy houses at artificially low prices to maintain racial balance -- but the result has been one of the few truly integrated suburbs anywhere in the country.

The major differences between these two sets of authors arise when they consider Lenin's question: What is to be done? In fairness to both, you could say they're really asking two related but separate questions: The DPZ planners ask what can be done, given the realities of the marketplace, and the academics ask what ought to be done, even if it's impossible. Both claim a kinship to the godparents of urban sociology, Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs, and both find inspiration in the new town movement of the early 20th century, which produced communities such as Greenbelt, Md., and Radburn, N.J.

In fact, Baxandall and Ewen see Greenbelt, a low-income cooperative community built by the Resettlement Administration, a New Deal government agency in charge of relocating the poor, as the most poignant example of what might have been. Although they realize that under current conditions federal intervention is exceedingly unlikely, they suggest that it remains the only agent capable of reinventing suburbia for the newly diverse working and middle classes of the 21st century. "Updating the suburban dream," they write, "requires visionaries such as those in the 1920s and 1930s, who saw social problems as questions demanding democratic, utopian answers."

While "Picture Windows" does not address the geographical component of suburban sprawl in any detail, it's hard to imagine that Baxandall and Ewen wouldn't concur with Duany, Plater-Zyberk and Speck's call for mixed-use, mixed-income developments designed to encourage street life and public transit and discourage isolation, traffic and waste. Yet they specifically excoriate them, comparing DPZ developments to theme parks where "set design takes the place of social imagination" and calling Seaside, DPZ's trademark town, "a packaged collection of nostalgia from a past that never was -- except perhaps on television."

Even if it's true that the small-town Americana design of Seaside looks like the set for "The Truman Show" (since, in fact, it was), how do we account for this vitriolic response to developers who are actually building a community-based alternative to conventional suburbia? Baxandall and Ewen even suggest that they prefer Levittown to Seaside, since at least the former is uncontaminated by nostalgia.

What we see here, I think, is the inevitable clash between modernism's mistrust of the past and traditionalism's mistrust of the future. For avowed progressives like Baxandall and Ewen, it may be impossible to abandon the Mumford/Wright dictum that Americans should embrace the clean, simple design of the machine age and purge themselves of their unhealthy and sentimental attachment to older styles. I doubt they really believe aesthetic choices should be imposed on suburbanites by some central authority; it's more that suburban development only seems acceptably democratic and Utopian to them if it's tied to the modernist project of creating a new, more rational social order. Never mind that the wood shingles, tin roofs and front porches of Seaside are apparently what home buyers want; they represent a reactionary "escape into the good old days."

It's certainly no secret that the DPZ planners have self-consciously modeled their new communities on old-fashioned urban neighborhoods, like Washington, D.C.'s Georgetown, or venerable American towns, like Alexandria, Va. As they concisely put it, "The design of new places should be modeled on old places that work." In fact, the DPZ design guidelines are style neutral, and they point out that a neighborhood can be traditional in its spatial organization and modern in style, like Miami's South Beach with its justly famous boulevards of art deco buildings. But Duany, Plater-Zyberk and Speck clearly have no interest in fighting the good fight for flat roofs and sliding glass doors. Architectural style, they insist, has almost no bearing on neighborhood function, so their developments employ styles that will sell. "All architecture is meaningless in the absence of good urban design," they write. "Behind six acres of parking, a true cantilever is no more ethical than a fake arch."

Accurately, if a little defensively, the "Suburban Nation" authors point out that while the European public may swallow modernism eagerly, Americans still don't like it or trust it. "The vast majority of home buyers are only interested in traditional architecture or, sadly, the middle ground of damaged compromise," they write. "It is hard enough convincing suburbanites to accept mixed uses, varied-income housing and public transit without throwing flat roofs and corrugated metal siding into the equation."

Somewhere in the tension between these two books there's a valuable discussion about the moral nature and purpose of urban design waiting to happen. One could certainly argue that principled planners like DPZ have a responsibility to strive for excellent contemporary style and to resist the kitsch and gingerbread that, they admit, often infect their developments. On the other hand, what is suburban sprawl, with its endless malls and subdivisions, but the bastard child of modernism, the nightmarish realization of Le Corbusier's dream of a decentered "radiant city"? No matter what our politics are, I wonder if we owe that tradition anything except a vigorous effort to destroy it.

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