Urbanism and urbanists; city planning by another name,
those folks concerned with the design of our cities.
The new urbanists, those neo-traditionalists,
who favor going back in time, history, to a safe place.
Erecting new cities, like the ones of olden days gone by.
Full of Georgian, Victorian, Colonial homes.
These old-looking new houses with their porches, fences, and back yards,
laid out with narrow streets, mixed land uses, jobs close by.

With town centers and village greens, like it use to be,
as if something was wrong with modernism, current trends.
Progressive planning, or regressive nostalgia?
Trying to bring about social change through architecture,
by the way our cities are designed, or should be.
Against the modern trends, the avant-guard, the nuevo,
being built for the proletariat, not the bourgeois, they say.
Yet who ultimately can afford to pay the price will decide.

As the automobile undermined the railroad,
so did freeways and highways destroy our cities.
Built by government and their officials: federal, state, and local.
They created the public roadways for the suburbs,
based on political considerations, not architectual ones.
These were government decisions made by politicians,
not architects using principles of sound urban design.
Let alone new urbanists, practicing the latest form of urbanism.

Trying to create cities as if they had no automobiles,
these rich developments, built on the edges of towns.
Sprawl under another name, new suburbs, suburbia?
Maybe not new towns, but the next best thing
to living in a real city, yet in the suburbs.
Not like the real thing, like America's older cities.
A grass-roots planning movement, or building utopias?
The public, not the planners, will ultimately decide!