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Compassionate Landscape is the most lyrical and personal. Humphrey Carver, an architect and artist, was one of the first "planners" hired by the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corp. He is also the only one of the three authors who genuinely loves the idea of the suburb. Not surprisingly -- for he lived in one of Canada's oldest, most elegant suburbs, Ottawa's Rockcliffe Park. For Carver, a suburb is a place where human activity and nature can exist in harmony.

I visited him toward the end of his life and was impressed with the beauty of his long, low bungalow, built beside a narrow, densely treed lane. The inside had a hobbit comfort to it, with a long, refectory table in the dining room, a stone fireplace, wonderful natural light, and books and pictures everywhere. It felt like a much-loved place. Rockcliffe Park was built around the city's streetcar lines. Unfortunately, suburbs haven't been built around anything but the car for 50 years.

When he writes about idealized landscapes, as opposed to how postwar suburbs really are, Carver's book is at its most attractive. His puzzlement with how difficult it has been actually to create the kind of world he admired, one where nature and humans could co-exist within a "compassionate landscape," is a lesson in humility because it is told so guilelessly. There are no hidden agendas here. Just the story of a man's life.

The most powerful of the three books is The Geography of Nowhere. Kunstler is a novelist and he knows how to tell a story, in this case the story of how city-dwellers became addicted to cars (his book might have been titled The War Against Public Transit). There are other books where you can find more complete accounts of the shut-down of the United States' and Canada's streetcars by the car and tire manufacturers; Robert Moses's relentless asphalting of suburban New York and New Jersey; the launch by Lucius D. Clay (chairman of General Motors and president Dwight Eisenhower's chief transportation adviser) of the trillions of dollars needed to build the U.S. inter-state highway system. But no one pulls it all together as well as Kunstler. He does it from house design to the parkway.

And he puts his finger on why the car was so successful even when there was massive public support for streetcar systems. The car, oil, tire, asphalt, cement, steel, insurance and construction industries couldn't make large-enough profits on rail-based transport. Rail moved too many people too cheaply.

Kunstler understands the many costs of the car. It costs $22,000 to build one underground parking slot; Canada's large airports couldn't operate without the revenue from their parking lots. The last thing public or private institutions want is great public transit at their doors. The Geography of Nowhere enjoyed a certain underground popularity when it came out; it may enjoy a revival thanks to Kunstler's latest bestseller, The Long Emergency, dealing with the end of oil, natural gas and climate change.

What impresses me is how well the story of sprawl has been understood and for how long. The third book, The Last Landscape, is four decades old, but remains on university courses. William H. Whyte was a charter member of an impressive group of young men and women, including Jane Jacobs, who critiqued the destructive aspects of modern North American culture (his best-known book is The Organization Man). He's a good storyteller and a confident academic.

Whyte's pleas for intelligent growth -- land conserving, not land-burning -- remain as pertinent as ever. Yet little has changed since he wrote The Last Landscape. Aerial photographs of my city, Ottawa, or (fill in the blank with the city of your choice) say it all: Instead of communities and interesting settlement patterns, you see miles of grey parking lots sprinkled with small, square buildings -- more land under asphalt than habitation.

The problem is not knowledge, it's politics. Federal and provincial governments use our constitution, written in the days of the horse and buggy, to avoid tackling urban problems instead of solving them. Yet it's clear that as oil supplies fade, the commonwealth is going to be more important than private wealth -- the reverse of where we have been going. Canada has just passed through two of the richest decades ever experienced, and where is our needed public infrastructure? The national rail service? The vibrant urban transit systems? In 2005, we move fewer people on public transit per capita than we did in 1960.

What thinking person cannot be frightened by the millions of car-dependent people relying on cheap oil and billions of public dollars invested in roads? How will these people get to work or be supplied with food and goods when the days of cheap fossil fuels end?

The stories in these books are worth revisiting. They help us think about movement and community in ways that can make a better future possible.

Clive Doucet is a poet and city councillor in Ottawa. He is completing a book on cities, A New Order of Things: The rise of cities and decline of states.

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