"Stop talking about putting the city back into its 19th-century state to make mass transit work."

"Instead, let's see what people want to do, then see how the city can be built around them."

A quote from "Sprawl: A Compact History," by Robert Bruegmann, reviewed by architecture critic Kevin Nance.

"There's a certain contrarian glee that Bob takes in goring sacred cows, and I think there's value in challenging us to look at these issues fresh," says Ned Cramer, curator of the Chicago Architecture Foundation. "But I don't think I can set aside my prejudices about the vacuousness of life in suburban sprawl. Gertrude Stein said, 'There's no there there,' and I still on an emotional, psychological and intellectual level fail to find any 'there' in the vast majority of sprawl-style developments that I visit and have lived in. And it's interesting that Bob lives and works in a traditional city. I don't see him moving to Aurora."

Still, the early critical response to Bruegmann's book has been mostly positive, with reviewers such as Witold Rybczynski, the architecture critic of the online magazine Slate, lauding Sprawl as an "iconoclastic little book" that "demonstrates that sprawl is not the anomalous result of American zoning laws, or mortgage interest tax deduction, or cheap gas, or subsidized highway construction, or cultural antipathy toward cities."

Chicago architect Stanley Tigerman is equally enthusiastic.

"The intellectual perception of sprawl is a snobbish one that says it's all crap, and Bob points out that it just ain't that way," Tigerman says.

Here in Madison, people tend to gasp about sprawl, but absurdly, they also object to tall buildings downtown. We're progressive: we don't really want anything to change. Except we want light rail. Because light rail would be a wonderful way to spend money to help us feel really good about ourselves.