Those who wish success to Asia watch with alarm as the headlong urbanization takes their countries backwards, to a less competitive position. The cities as they are being built cannot become the great capitals of the future; they will be a blot on each country's reputation and a drag on their economic performance.

The problem is that the urban model being imported for these Asian cities is based on the Standard of Living rather than on Quality of Life they provide. While these concepts appear to be similar, they are not interchangeable. In fact, their outcome can be as opposed as the two sides of the same coin on a bet.

The distinctions may be explained through examples: Standard of Living is quantifiable: How tall are your office buildings, and how new are they? How many of your people are newly housed? How many cars do they own and how many miles of highway do they drive on? What is their income? Such facts are highly visible and charged with symbolic power: the tallest skyscrapers, and the most constant traffic jams attest to success measured by Standard of Living. By such criteria at least two Asian countries already outperformed the West.

Quality of Life, on the other hand, while tangible is immeasurable. It is concerns how well people live in their own terms: How pleasant is the time spent moving through the city? Is there a lifestyle option that minimizes or even eliminates commuting altogether? How much discretionary personal time and income remains after the needs are fulfilled: is time at the cafe or with the kids available, or is it consumed commuting. Is their income to buy really good housing (lots of space, several bathrooms, good appliances) or is it inevitably committed to the mandatory ownership of automobiles, sometimes several being necessary. Is there time and money for heavy leisure like owning a sailboat or for travel, or are they fully committed to mitigating dysfunctional aspects of the city that is being built.

The experience of the United States of the past twenty years is instructive in the regard. There is a new generation of failed cities. There are currently not just the old rust belt cities, which dissipated with the loss of their industries; there are now the fading conurbations of the post-war Sunbelt. Miami, Dallas, Houston, and Los Angeles are not exactly dismal places, but their reputation is low. The really "good" cities are now the likes of Portland, Seattle, Vancouver, and Toronto.

How is this explained? Not by their weather certainly. And yet the young and the talented flock to them in droves, while the old sunbelt cities have increasing difficulty attracting them and the industries they energize. The disparity in reputation cannot be measured by their Standard of Living, as in this way the Sunbelt cities still outperform the others. The difference, clearly, is that their Quality of Life is better, and the mobile talent has an unerring nose for it.

In this regard how will the forthcoming Asian cities measure up? Dismally, it seems. What good is the world's tallest building if the experience of the streets around it is brutalizing to the pedestrian? What good is the elegance of the elevator if much more time must spent in a nerve-racking commute? What good are the high incomes if they must be spent buying many cars per family? I suppose that the talented young executives can be ordered to such a city, but they will be anxious to depart for more pleasant places.

The tragedy in the making is that the architects and planners working in Asia (retained or trained in the West) are foisting upon their cities an outdated model which has was first proven to be unsustainable in Los Angeles and then confirmed elsewhere. North America and Europe are backpedaling furiously to the models of their traditional moderately dense, compact cities while Asia builds hyper-dense cores and sprawling suburbs. Whether this is steam from provincial ignorance or from an ideological belief in Modernism, the result is the same. The cities of Asia are going to be relatively unlivable. Their countries will suffer from this as surely as outdated equipment hobbles a business enterprise. . . . and cities are more difficult to discard.

How, then, should these new cities be conceived? The answer is more pragmatically, less affected by the theory and symbols of modernism. A true pragmatism is neither nostalgic nor futurist but rather Neo-traditional. This very specific term was identified and defined by Stanford Research in the mid 80's as the ethos of the baby-boom generation for the remainder of its dominance, which will last to the year2030. Even if Asia lacks the demographic phenomenon of the American baby boom, its ethos will continue to be everywhere copied. It an ethos that the new Asian cities will be incapable of satisfying.

Neo-traditionalism is an anti-ideological selection of whatever works best without regard for its origins in the past or the future. Both traditionalism and modernism are ideological, the refuge of those who are categorically nostalgic for a better past or categorically anxious for the arrival of a better future. Neo-traditionalism emphasizes practical results over such theories.

I am typical of this generation. My town planning firm works worldwide and I could live virtually anywhere with a hub airport, but I could not conceive of a long-term residence in, Hong Kong, Taipei or Kuala Lumpur. Why would I put up with the low Quality of Life in these cities except to temporarily suckle at the economic boom?

The countries of the Pacific Rim, at this point in history, are capable of anything. Their cities can be made like Houston or Los Angeles: a core stuffed with high-tech high-rises, jammed highways, shopping centers surrounded by parking lots, distant housing across a countryside which is only a memory, and a citizenry in permanent hock to the car companies. Or they can choose to be like Portland and Vancouver: cities of mixed-use Neighborhoods moderately sized office buildings, pleasant walkable streets with shop along them, adequate parking and road capacity but also streetcars.

Portland and Vancouver have not done the impossible, they have simply preserved best of the past and reinforced it with whatever good the future promises. It is already too late to implement this model in the old capital cities of Asia, but the New Cities which are now on the drawing boards, stand a chance to adopt Quality of Life as their guiding principle. So that when the capitals lose their appeal, those that abandon them will have places to live within their own nations and will not be tempted away by the sophisticated cities of North America. Those which having learned form the failure of others, and have taken a different course.

Andres Duany is a town planner. He is currently designing the new town of Sitio San Cristobal at Canluban for the Yulo Family.