Will the suburbs become the place to be?

One path takes us to the vision of Will Alsop, the maverick architect whose ideas have formed the basis of the Masterplan under which umbrella the current regeneration of Bradford is taking place.

Will Alsop envisages what he calls the SuperCity, a continuous ribbon of residential, retail, leisure and industrial development which stretches from Liverpool to Hull, with the shiny new Bradford at its very centre.

Alsop is all for trashing the status quo, doing away with the traditional boundaries between work and play, living and shopping. His Masterplan for Bradford mixes iconic design with preserved tradition, a shopping centre here and a wide open space there, with something for everyone within the unique grid structure of the Masterplan footprint.

He wants to, in essence, do away with the old idea of city centres and living areas as separate beasts. He wants, to put it bluntly, to sound the death-knell for suburbia.

On his last visit to Bradford in the summer, Alsop said that regeneration has to revolve around human beings. "It has to be about the people who live and work in the environment. Politicians and planners often impose a notion of what people want but don't actually ask them."

What he's convinced that people don't want is just more and more housing estates. He has said: "New housing is going to happen, so the big question I'm posing is, in what form is that going to happen? My big fear is that it is just going to be more housing on green fields because that is easy and economic and is a model that everyone knows and understands.

"But it doesn't work. I've seen it in quite small places where people who live on the most recent estates, which are by definition on the edge of town, never go into it.

"I'm not against suburbia, but there comes a point where suburbia doesn't work any more because you don't belong to anywhere."

Enter, stage right, Joel Kotkin, an international Fellow at Pepperdine University School of Business in Los Angeles and an authority on global economic and social issues.

Cities, says Kotkin, are mankind's greatest creation. And to prove it he has a book just out called simply The City: A Global History. And in the book Kotkin posits the other possible path for our imaginary trip into the future, and his prediction is most definitely that our destiny lies in the suburbs.

His book is both a history of the concept of the human city and a look at its future. He turns his attention to Bradford several times in the volume, marking it out as an example of how cities exploded with rapid growth thanks to the Industrial Revolution. But he also quotes a number of sources that support his theory that city centres are not necessarily conducive to quality of life, never have been, and never will be.

He writes: "One West Indian slave-holder, on a visit to Bradford, thought it impossible for any human being to be so cruel as to require a child of nine to work twelve-and-a-half hours a day'."

And: "These were places to make money, not to spend one's leisure time. There are no pleasant rides, no pleasant walks,' a socially prominent Bradford doctor complained, all being bustle, hurry and confusion'."

Of course, Kotkin could not hope to base a modern thesis on the state of Bradford two centuries ago. But he stands by his belief that he has seen the future and it is suburban.

"Sorry, city sophisticates, but the metropolis of the future may prove far less intensely urban than you hope," he writes on his website. "For all the focus on trendy downtowns and skyscrapers, the real growth in jobs and population is likely to take place on the periphery. The new urbanism, built around downtown revival and beloved by the celebrated starchitects, will cede pride of place to the new suburbanism'."

Kotkin believes we should not fight the growth of urban sprawl, but focus on ways to make it work better. He says: "It's about bringing business and jobs, not just bedrooms, to the outer rings, and reviving main streets in smaller towns and cities, not just in major urban centres. In some senses, the new suburbanism seeks to recover the ideals of early advocates of decentralisation such as the early-20th century British visionary Ebenezer Howard, who proposed dispersing populations into largely self-sustaining garden cities'. These preferences are increasingly universal. In Europe, Canada, Japan and Australia, growth is spilling out of urban centres, even in places that boast extensive mass-transit systems. In London, the centre has been losing population since at least the 1960s. As H G Wells predicted a century ago, much of southern and central England is a vast suburb of the capital."

Perhaps our trip to the future does not just offer two possible paths. Perhaps there is a third, which takes elements of Kotkin's exclusively suburban future and melds it with Alsop's patchwork quilt of an endless work-rest-and-play megalopolis.

Bradford is already going down the route of mixing and matching leisure, retail and residential in the city centre, with the conversion of many old mills into apartments and the awaited-with-bated-breath Broadway development.

But by the same token, the suburbs are not being ignored. In fact, the city centre and the suburbs are mingling and merging, with the unveiling of schemes such as the World Mile which pushes up from the city centre to White Abbey Road, combining homes and shops, and the "mini-masterplans" recently unveiled for areas such as Manningham.

Although Alsop and Kotkin would seem to disagree on the path we should take, they are of a single mind on one thing: our cities will grow and change.

Kotkin says: "We will have to redefine what the city is."

And Alsop wrote in a book to accompany the SuperCity plan that we need to be "challenging the idea of the city itself in its traditional form."

Whichever path we find ourselves on, it seems that life in our cities will never be the same again.

l The City: A Global History, by Joel Kotkin, is published in paperback by Phoenix at £8.99.