C: Margaret's always accusing people of weaving "narratives of loss." And she should. Why are people so nostalgic? Sure, there's a laundry list of things that are wrong, and sure, there's never been a bigger need for thoughtful planning. But why does this always translate into some New Urbanist fantasy? Rae's book, despite its own narrative of loss, does one thing remarkably well: it exposes the contingency of early twentieth-century urbanism by showing how a city such as New Haven was a product of world events (inventions, policy prescriptions, demographic trends), that just as easily might not have transpired. Early twentieth-century urbanism was anything but inevitable; take away the conditions (for example, the invention, development and dissemination of steam power), and you wouldn't have had, for example, the density or the heterogeneity that you had in a city like New Haven in 1900.

G: Yeah, Rae provides the best evidence against the New Urbanism that he himself wants to argue for. It's so basic and yet it is ignored by so many people: for something to thrive, it has to have the right conditions. What we all admire about a city such as New Haven in 1900 are things that, today, would require an enormous investment in artificial support mechanisms. The New Urbanist approach is a variant on the Field of Dreams theory: build it and it will happen. But this isn't the case. The conditions don't really exist for the sorts of things they want to grow.