A Chinese delegation from Beijing arrived in Phoenix last month and headed west to the Sonoran Desert, deep into suburbia. Its destination: a quintessential American residential development in Buckeye, one of the many suburbs dotting the sprawling metropolitan area. Members of the group studied the streetscape, the golf course, the spa, the cybercafé, the health care amenities and the design of the single-family homes at Sun City Festival, a 3,000-acre, planned community for people over 55. They commented on the cleanliness and orderliness of it all. The 25 Chinese who toured the Del Webb development were not seniors planning their retirement but government officials and their spouses, a couple of architects and a banker. Their mission: study American suburbia with an eye toward replicating it back home. For good or bad, the USA's suburbs have become a living laboratory for the world. Developing countries contending with explosive population growth and economic expansion are looking here for hints about how to manage growing cities. For many, modern suburbia — a largely American concept and lifestyle for more than 50 years — is a nirvana worth emulating. Others want to avoid it. "They both admire and fear it," says Robert Lang, director of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech. "There are two lessons they take out of the U.S.: unfettered development or sprawl and an appreciation for well-done, master-planned communities." Copied for years on a smaller scale and adapted to deal with more stringent environmental standards and limited land in Western Europe, American suburbs now have gone truly global: •Affluent gated communities are sprouting up next to shantytowns outside Buenos Aires. •On the outskirts of Lahore, Pakistan, new single-family homes are a testament to that country's rising middle class. •Across China, entire suburban cities are being built at a dizzying speed to keep up with population growth. Outside Beijing and Shanghai, tract-home developments designed to mimic Spanish or Italian architecture have all-American names: Yosemite and Napa Valley. Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe have unleashed such a development boom that they have turned to the USA for lessons on how to do it — and how not to. The push is on to inspire developing countries to do what more American communities are doing: steer away from sprawling, cookie-cutter subdivisions popularized after World War II and create sustainable communities that will not deplete natural resources. That includes developments built around mass-transit stations to reduce reliance on cars and projects that mix homes and businesses so that people can walk from home to stores and other services. The global discussion has begun: •Virginia Tech hosted a conference last week on the "Suburban World." It attracted 135 people — including more than 40 planners and scholars from 19 countries and every continent except Antarctica. Participants toured Washington's Northern Virginia suburbs and saw examples of an "edge city" — a huge business district outside a traditional urban center (Tysons Corner) — and town centers (Reston). They discussed the environmental, social and economic impacts of suburbia in many countries, from Italy and Germany to Nigeria and Brazil. "The conference is an effort to address the question of whether or not American-style suburbia is spreading," says Lang, who will be a Fulbright scholar at the Sorbonne University in Paris next month to lecture on European and American suburbs. "The fact that we are all coming to the (United) States … shows that there are concerns," says Dirk Heinrichs, urban planning research associate at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research-UFZ in Leipzig, Germany. After touring Tysons Corner, he said: "I'm overwhelmed by the lack of coherent design. … It's 'build where you want.' " •The University of Michigan's A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning last month put on a conference entitled "Global Suburbs." The conference's program called suburbanization "no longer solely the province of developed Western countries." •The Urban Land Institute (ULI), a research and education group for developers, is promoting its best industry practices in emerging markets worldwide and is taking foreign groups on "study tours" of the USA. "They contact organizations like ULI in an effort to learn from past mistakes made in the U.S., not to repeat them," says John Fitzgerald, managing director of ULI Asia, in an e-mail. •The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, based in Cambridge, Mass., and Peking University are opening a Center for Urban Development and Land Policy at the Chinese university this month. "The lesson that can be learned from the U.S. is to mimic some good ideas and avoid some wrong principles," says Saeed Ahmed Saeed, CEO of Limitless, a Dubai-based development company that is building cities and waterfront projects from Saudi Arabia to India, Russia and Vietnam. "Most of the developers (worldwide) are not doing it the right way. … We have a professional responsibility. Future generations will not forgive us if we don't do it right." Spreading outward The first true suburb was born in the 1830s outside Manchester, England, Lang says. It was Victoria Park, a gated community of luxury homes that now is part of Manchester. About 20 years later came the first U.S. suburb — gated Llewellyn Park in West Orange, N.J., about 12 miles from Manhattan. Streetcar suburbs followed, first along the route of horse-drawn streetcars and later along rail corridors such as Philadelphia's Main Line. After World War I, pedestrian-oriented suburbs flourished, including the Country Club Plaza district in Kansas City and Beverly Hills. Suburban expansion came to a standstill during the Great Depression and "the great burst comes after World War II," Lang says. Tract-style subdivisions dependent on the automobile flourished. The most famous is Levittown, on New York's Long Island. Then came larger, 1960s-era split-levels and colonials on cul-de-sacs. Within 20 years, suburbs exploded in the booming Sun Belt around Dallas, Atlanta, Phoenix and other fast-growing cities. Then the craze for large luxury homes — dubbed McMansions — pushed development to the farthest fringes of metropolitan areas, where land was still cheap and plentiful. That helped spark an anti-sprawl fervor still alive today that has the backing of many environmentalists, preservationists, health professionals, farmers and big-city mayors. Suburban sensibilities began to change. Town centers designed to mimic small cities sprouted in suburbia. New light-rail lines were built and transit-oriented developments along the tracks followed. More people embraced "new urbanism," a movement that strives to capture the essence of turn-of-the-century communities. Central cities enjoyed a renaissance as young professionals and empty-nesters embraced the urban lifestyle. Today, the dialogue about suburbs among urban thinkers around the world is intensifying largely because of universal concern over global warming. There is worry about traffic congestion and air pollution. That's why designing suburbs that require residents to drive to get anywhere is losing relevance. "The energy crisis, climate change. Nobody can overlook that today," says Kiril Stanilov, associate professor of planning at the University of Cincinnati. Exporting the American dream As more Third World countries' economies develop, their middle class grows. So does the draw of traditional, U.S.-style suburbia. "The suburbs represent, almost like a cliché, the American dream," says New York architect Kevin Kennon, who has worked in China and Pakistan and is the executive director of the Institute for Architecture and Urban Study. "I can own a piece of land, I can have my house on that land. … It allows people to point to something that they own and distinguish it from other houses, even if they look the same." The Chinese delegation that visited Phoenix suburbs last month "had a keen interest in finding out what is this Petri dish of Del Webb communities they've been hearing about for many years," says Jacque Petroulakis, a Del Webb spokeswoman. She says hundreds of foreign architects, planners, developers and private investors from Japan, China, Germany and South America have visited the company's developments in recent years. The rise of the middle class in developing nations is happening as more of the world's population shifts from rural to urban areas. More than half of the world's population and about 80% of the U.S. population live in urban areas. "Every year, we add 60 million urban residents on Earth," Stanilov says. "The countries most susceptible to embracing the American model are particularly those with a booming economy and an emerging class of affluent residents and consumers really eager to embrace the American lifestyles. They don't want just the house but the whole package, the three-car garage, the mall, all of that." For many developing nations, however, the suburban ideal is stuck in circa 1980: a sea of lookalike single-family homes and shopping malls on the edge of the city. It's a model that many Americans increasingly are rejecting. "Most intellectuals say it's horrible. Most environmentalists say the same thing," says Nora Libertun de Duren, urban planning professor at Columbia University and an expert on suburbs in developing countries. "But developers say it's good business, and architects say it's good business." Developers adapt their projects to fit the local culture. In respect for strict Muslim tenets about privacy, for example, Kennon has built high walls around every home in a subdivision he's working on in Lahore. Some of his homes in China have two kitchens — a regular kitchen and one with natural ventilation to allow fresh air to circulate while cooking fried foods. In Argentina, developers are building gated communities in poor neighborhoods. Shantytowns pepper the outskirts of Buenos Aires, areas that had no roads and other infrastructure until a major upgrade in the 1990s, Libertun de Duren says. Once highways were built, gated developments went up and lured commuters who worked in the city. The developments provided employment to the residents of shantytowns, she says. Personal safety, a concern that has driven Americans out of cities and into suburbia, plays an even greater role in Latin America. "You have the gated community phenomenon across the classes," Heinrichs says. "In principle, Latin American cities follow the U.S. model. The idea of living somewhere green outside the hustle and bustle of cities and all the contamination is pretty much the same." A hit in Eastern Europe Stanilov sees it firsthand every summer when he returns to Bulgaria. Driven by a flood of foreign investment, big-box retailers, industrial parks, malls and subdivisions are going up throughout Eastern Europe, he says. There are few building restrictions in former communist countries, where the population is sensitive to the specter of government control. "Of course government doesn't have that much money to service all these new developments," he says. "So you have little roads with lots of automobile traffic. … Wisdom doesn't transfer from country to country easily." China, where major cities are choking on stifling pollution, is striving to build the world's first sustainable city — Dongtan, which broke ground last summer. Designed by a London-based global consulting company and built on an island outside Shanghai, Dongtan, ultimately to house 50,000, will ban cars that pollute (even hybrids), grow its own food, recycle almost everything — including wastewater — and create its own energy from wind, the sun and human and animal waste. "The Chinese are very interested in doing the latest and most interesting things," says Paul Lukez, an architect from Somerville, Mass., and author of Suburban Transformations. "There's a recognition by the government that something needs to be done. … If something is cutting edge, whether it comes from the United States or Europe, they want it." Enlarge By Natalie Behring, special to USA TODAY A little Chinese girl plays in the playground of the "Beijing Riviera," a housing development in northern Beijing. Suburbia is no longer solely an American phenomenon. Guidelines: You share in the USA TODAY community, so please keep your comments smart and civil. 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