Well… it’s me he quoted and I’m Irish, not american. I wasn’t talking about the US only. Anyway, it’s not an american meme. In Dublin, there was a massive (and disastrous) effort to move the urban underclass from inner city tenements to what is now inner suburbs. Two generations before that, the upper middle class migrated from the inner city to (different) inner city suburbs.

The idea that cities are decrepit and suburbs are the future is a recurring one. Charles Dickens’ soot covered cities (in england, so I guess anglo-american?) existed and the middle class moved to the suburbs, much like americans.

The trend back into city centres today is wider than the US too.