suburban sprawl

Suburbs will continue to spread, and already a majority of people live in the sprawl. So we have to both improve existing suburbs, and influence new construction, away from oversimplification and towards greater density of connection.

This is pallid reformism. You should take the the long view and recommend stronger measures: draw urban growth boundaries; enforce mass transit; make the sprawl tighten up into a more city-like density.

This would be too much heavy-handed governmental action, and it wouldn't work. There is too much growth to accomodate, and Andres Duany is right that such policies would probably not be kept in place long enough to have their desired effects. Besides, attempts to stop sprawl utterly leave present suburban dwellers without any amelioration, for the sake of an imagined future total revolution.

Most Americans may not want dense cities, but they might well prefer smaller yet denser nodes instead of what they are presently being offered. Sprawl can be improved by new kinds of spatial density but also other kinds of nearness and connection than spatial proximity.

I appreciate your motivation, but aren't the very forces that created the sprawl in the first place going to resist the kind of efforts you are speaking of?

Yes, but we should be careful about making reductive explanations of sprawl described in a reductive way. There are many different forces at work, as is shown by the way sprawl is beginning to happen in Europe, which avoided those governmental policies that encouraged postwar US sprawl.

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