The radical critique of current American urban design practice articulated here may be as potent and important as the radical critique of Modernist practice articulated and worked through from the early 1960s (with Jane Jacobs) through the early 1980s (with Postmodernism). This time it is a radical critique of the late and stale fruits of that earlier critique. Just as late Modernism calcified into dogmatism and second rate production–inhuman corporate and public housing towers, so too has the humanist reaction against Modernism devolved into lifelessness and shallow formula. This devolution and the resulting need for a radical change of direction is here expressed with the power of a long submerged awareness at last coming to the surface. The realization in these pages is that our hope for revitalized urbanism and a more fulfilling and meaningful city life through a return to the patterns, texture, look, and scale of certain pre-20th-century cities and through a focus on yuppie lifestyles has created innumerable delusions and falsities.
25: Urban Design Now F/W 2006

Table of Contents
Editor’s Note
Essays
Beyond Centers, “Fabric,” and the Culture of Congestion: Urban Design as a Metropolitan Enterprise
Defining the Urbanistic Project: Ten Contemporary Approaches
Designing the Postmetropolis
Dispatch from the Subdivision Archipelago and Dubai…Is Not Yet
The End(s) of Urban Design
The Morals of Modernist Minimalism: A Provocation
The Upside of Gentrification
Toward a Well-Tempered Digital Design: The Architecture of Reiser + Umemoto
Urban Design after Battery Park City: Opportunities for Variety and Vitality in Large-Scale Urban Real-Estate Development
Urban Design Now: A Discussion
“Facts on the Ground” Urbanism from Mid-Road to Ditch
Reviews
A Field Guide to Sprawl by Dolores Hayden and Jim Wark
Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions by Fredric Jameson
The Birth of City Planning in the United States, 1840–1917 by Jon A. Peterson