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Leonard Downie, Jr.

	"The Midwest: An Unlikely Laboratory For New Towns Freeways came late to the urban Midwest, after they had been tried to relieve traffic congestion in the crowded East and had created an entirely new pattern of living in California. Today, the multi-lane divided highways marked by prominent blue and red interstate route signs dominate the metropolitan landscapes of Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago and Minneapolis. And they all seem to be carrying more and more people out of these cities into the vast suburban areas around them.
	The Santa Clara Valley's "Appointment with Destiny" Eye-smarting, mustard-colored haze hides all but the shadowy outlines of the mountains on each side of the long, flat valley. Automobiles push and shove through crowded concrete and neon strips of stores, service stations, car lots and taco stands. Here and there, small isolated groves of the last surviving fruit trees fight strangulation by the surrounding subdivisions, factories and freeways. Acres of roofed box houses huddle tightly together, back to back and side to side, without open spaces, parks or even sidewalks. Many tattered homes just ten years old slouch in ready-built slums, their gravel roofs leaking, concrete slab foundations cracked, flimsy veneer doors and walls warped, stick fences rotting and sparse dirt yards alternately flooding and heaving.
	Two New Town Mirages They are the most unlikely of locations: a remote hot, dry Arizona moonscape of dusty, rocky hills and dark, foreboding treeless mountains around a long forgotten reservoir lake on the Colorado River at the California border; and 500 miles away, a once lifeless below-sea-level marsh and salt pond jutting from the San Francisco peninsula into the bay south of San Francisco in teeming San Mateo County, California. On these sites, two of the most audacious, ambitious, highly publicized and personalized versions of the "new town" concept in the United States are being built.
	Israel Builds Under a warm winter sun, Bedouin tribesmen in layered dark flowing robes, with long curved knives dangling from their belts, hurry about their business in the busy streets of the old town of Beersheva, the gateway to the Negev desert, much as generations of their forebearers have done before them. In this modern day, the Bedouins, who still come to town leading caravans of camels to the early morning market, cross paths with bankers, shopkeepers, college students, desert scientists, ever-increasing numbers of tourists, and ubiquitous uniformed Israeli soldiers, the young women in distractingly short olive green skirts and the young men carrying their automatic rifles as casually as the Bedouins wear their knives, setting the guns down on snack bar counters as one might an umbrella. Despite the souvenir shops, travel agencies, banks, offices and department stores crowded into its small buildings, the old town center of Beersheva still resembles a frontier town.
	Israel's Second Generation New Towns For many tourists and resident foreigners, Jerusalem is the place to be in Israel. Among the countless emotional touchstones and historical reminders in and around its ancient walled "old city" are important shrines of three major religions: the excavated western ("wailing") wall of the Hebrews' second temple; the Moslems' golden-domed Mosque of Omar over the rook on which Mohammed is said to have ascended into Heaven; and the various places where Jesus was tried, forced to carry the cross, crucified and buried. Inside the traditional "Jewish quarter" of the old city and on the hills of eastern Jerusalem that overlook it - all of which was captured by the Israelis from Jordan during the 1967 war - historic old buildings are being remodeled and modern highrises are being constructed, mostly to provide luxurious hotels and "second home" apartments for wealthy foreigners, many of them Americans. The rest of Jerusalem also continues to grow vigorously (and, some fear, too rapidly) as the capital of Israel and world center of Jewish culture, with new government offices, museums, archives, university buildings and suburban residential communities.
	The Modern Sack of Rome Rather than the usual gaggle of tourists, the crowd moving up Michelangelo's monumental steps to the top of Capitoline Hill in the heart of Rome on a recent wintry night was made up of several hundred ragged men, women and children representative of the estimated 60,000 residents of suburban shanty towns surrounding the Italian capital. This particular group of families had been moved by the government out of a squalid slum in Pietralata, on the eastern edge of Rome, to only slightly better "provisional" quarters in nearby army barracks originally built for Fascist troops before World War II. They had gone to Capitoline Hill to take their plea for better, permanent housing directly to Rome's mayor and city council.
	Le Mirail: A Study In Concrete From inside an automobile circling the first nearly completed section of Le Mirail on the project's system of ring roads, little appears to be very different about this large new quarter of the old city of Toulouse in southwestern France. The familiar perimeter of apartment buildings, some boxy four-story walkups and many more long, lean elevator buildings of ten to fourteen stories each, circumscribes an unseen core where one expects to find an open parking lot and/or unused swatch of newly laid sod dotted with little stake-supported saplings. It is the exterior face of countless mass housing developments and "new town" projects throughout Europe.
	Paris: Under Construction It is not yet in. the guide books, and may never be, except perhaps as a curious bete noire, a grim specter of modern reality rising smack in the middle of the city of everyone's nostalgia. But it is there, nevertheless, on a level with the Eiffel Tower and the tops of the Invalides and Pantheon domes as one approaches Paris from Orly airport. Inside the city, it pops up absurdly over the lush green treetops of the Luxembourg and Tuileries gardens, pierces the harmonious line of older, much lower and more graceful buildings at the end of one grand boulevard after another, and rises above the squat 18th century Ecole Militaire to peek out from behind the Eiffel Tower in the view of the Champ de Mars from the Palais de Chaillot across the Seine.
	The New Towns of Paris: Reorganizing Suburbs To get to Parly 2, one drives west of Paris and through a short stretch of typical French countryside almost to the edge of the thick forest of Versailles before turning down a road that opens abruptly onto U.S. suburbia. There, grouped around a large enclosed shopping center and its surrounding parking lot are acres of identical modern three-story walkup apartment buildings interspersed with swimming pools, lawns and small playgrounds. The shopping center is a covered, air conditioned, two-story rectangular mall with a big department store at each end, rows of smaller shops and boutiques along the sides, and a few kiosks and snack places, as well as an indoor fountain and decorative pool, in the middle. Americans familiar with any of the scores of similar centers in the United States might well feel more at home at Parly 2 than in the U.S. Embassy in Paris.
	The Urban Order of the North United States city planners, disheartened by the physical and functional disorder of the uncontrolled spread of urban America, have always been very enthusiastic about what they find when they visit Sweden. Very little of the growth of the vast metropolitan area of Stockholm, by far Sweden's largest city, has "just happened." The purposefulness of its planning can be seen from the window of any one of Stockholm's green subway trains as it emerges from its inner-city tunnels and travels above ground through the "suburbs" in any direction.
	Embattled London No issue – not even the dock strike, floating of the pound sterling or final approval of British entry into the Common Market – has consistently been given so much attention in England's headline-heavy, highly opinionated daily press in recent months as have the many controversies over runaway real estate development in London.
	The Disappointing New Towns of Great Britain Straddling a divided four-lane highway on a windy hilltop northeast of Glasgow is a chaotic architectural montage of interconnected buildings and passages of various sizes, shapes and colors that has become internationally famous: the all-in-one city center of the new town of Cumbernauld. The irregular mass of stores, offices, apartments, a hotel and a church seems to be constantly in motion; as you approach, it takes on a different shape with every change in angle. It was meant to be the pulsating heart of Cumbernauld.