Take away the straw men that he's usually doing battle with, and I doubt there's all that much difference between the picture Kotkin paints and the way I see the world, though the rhetorical emphasis does differ. I actually think lots of people don't want to live in urban hellholes, even though I quite like mine. I just want to make the suburbs better by making them more "urban," and while I think that requires a bit more change than Kotkin generally writes about, my vision of the end result probably isn't that much different.
