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3. New Urbanism and the Way We Want to Live The operative assumption, and one even born out by periodic polls conducted in various regions, is that the New Urbanism represents the way that Americans want to live. 89 There is little proof, however, that the various constituencies of today's cities, suburban towns or larger, inner ring suburbs hanker for a particular New Urban vision or for any at all. As one scholar has written, the ideology of New Urbanism is both "utopian" and "deeply fraught."90 This is reflected in a rhetoric which assumes that the United States in general and its cities in particular are populated by like-minded persons who share a desire for "community" but who "have only the dimmest idea of what that means in terms of physical design."91 Though the New Urbanism movement pulls within its fold persons from varying social, economic, and racial backgrounds, it is none too clear that the "traditional" city that they all remember is the same one. "Well- founded" communities, it has been pointed out, often exclude, frequently by defining themselves against others and ultimately serve as barriers to rather than sources of social change.92 Though rarely acknowledged, the collective memory out of which new Urbanism has been created is contested and contingent. To summarize, urban land use planning in the United States began as a mostly private system of land use regulation which, after the turn of the nineteenth century, ultimately evolved 89 Peter Calthorpe & William Fulton, The Regional City: New Urbanism & the End of Sprawl 130 (2001). 90 David Harvey, The Spaces of Utopia, in Between Law and Culture: Relocating Legal Studies 105 (David Theo Goldberg et al. eds., 2001). 91 James Howard Kunstler, Home From Nowhere: Remaking Our Everyday World for the 21 st Century 194 (1996). 92 Harvey, supra note 90, at 105. 25