New York gets it from all sides. In a recent issue of Rolling Stone, James Howard Kunstler writes, in an excerpt from his forthcoming book “The Long Emergency,” of the “peak oil” crisis that many geologists and energy experts believe is imminent. According to this theory, we shall soon be on the downward slope of peak global oil extraction, with catastrophic consequences for our petroleum-dependent living arrangements. (Lest one think the theory merely the domain of Club of Rome-type crackpots, bear in mind that President Bush’s and Vice President Cheney’s principal energy adviser, Matthew Simmons, is among the “peak oil” crowd.) It’s scary stuff, and Mr. Kunstler – that combination of Tom Wolfe and Girolamo Savonarola – lets us readers, whom he calls “wicked people,” really have it.

What he most loathes is American suburbia, the cheap-oil, easy-credit, drive-through Utopia that represents the American lifestyle the president says is “not negotiable.” But what of New York? After all, we have the mass transit infrastructure and dense, walkable neighborhoods that are the antithesis of suburbia. New York’s problem, Mr. Kunstler says, is dual. First, the scale of Manhattan’s high-rise buildings makes them energy hogs: One day soon, all those skyscrapers will be like the ruins of a dead ancient city. Second, we are besieged on all sides by vast suburban and exurban belts of hyper-development that have destroyed the near-in agriculture that may be cities’ only savior once oil-dependent global agribusiness sputters to a halt in the next few years. Bottom line: New York “has no future.”

No one looks at the world more differently from Mr. Kunstler than does Joel Kotkin, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. For many years, Mr. Kotkin has been the cheerleader for “sprawl.” Put Messrs. Kotkin and Kunstler in a room together, and I’d be surprised if fisticuffs did not ensue. Yet Mr. Kotkin is as little bullish on New York as Mr. Kunstler. The future, Mr. Kotkin says, belongs to the sprawling settlements in the urban hinterlands, or to those cities, like Los Angeles, that follow the London model of decentralized clusters of semi-autonomous villages. New York is an anachronism, a kind of city once needed, but now and increasingly a shell of its former self.

Joel Kotkin’s new book bears the grand title “The City: A Global History” (Modern Library, 205 pages, $21.95). If ever a title sounded like a magnum opus, it is this. I expected something like Lewis Mumford’s “The City in History,” a massive tome. Mr. Kotkin’s book, rather, comes in the Modern Library Chronicles series of brief histories of big subjects. The series includes Paul Johnson on the Renaissance, Richard Pipes on Communism, A.N. Wilson on London, James Wood on the novel, and 40 other titles. Yet of all these, “the city” comes closest to being “A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters” (as one Julian Barnes novel was called). It’s a huge subject.

At times the experience of reading the book reminded me of being on a bus tour in the city: “That was the Empire State Building.” In this book, it’s more like “Look back, quick – that’s Renaissance Florence we just passed!” As a result, this book is basically without any scholarly value whatsoever. Which is not to say that it is not without value, and a great deal of it.

I’ll admit that Mr. Kotkin often makes me grind my teeth. It’s because I don’t like the kinds of cities he likes, yet I must acknowledge that much of what he says is true – and if not true prima facie, nonetheless requiring of a careful rejoinder.

Rather than a grand scholarly history, Mr. Kotkin’s book – 160 pages minus end matter – is more of an extended op-ed, of the sort of which Mr. Kotkin is one of our living masters. His basic thesis is that “sprawl” (that dirty word!) is a central fact of modern urban history. And he is of course right. The Chicago sociologists (whom he does not reference) developed the “upward and outward” model of urban growth: That is, as one rises economically (“upward”), one moves farther from the urban core (“outward”). We view Manhattan as a contradiction of this theory. After all, the rich populate the core – often to the tune of several million dollars for an apartment. “Upward and upward” would seem a better description of those living in the Time Warner Center.

Yet historically, Manhattan is the very model of American sprawl. Greenwich Village, Murray Hill, the Upper East Side – each was once the outer edge of development, as the affluent fled congested and pestilential conditions in the “core” for greener pastures upon subdivided farmlands. The exurban growth that raises the hackles of the anti-sprawl lobby today is not a process akin to that by which Manhattan developed – it is the same process. That some rich opt to live in the Manhattan core, or that young professional couples buy brownstones in inner-city Brooklyn – these are fascinating phenomena. More exactly, they are epiphenomena of a much larger movement, of which David Brooks’s masters of the barbecue pit represent the more salient phenomena.

Mr. Kotkin not only sees this, but sees also the history behind it. He writes: “Three critical factors have determined the overall health of cities – the sacredness of place, the ability to provide security and project power, and last, the animating role of commerce. Where these factors are present, urban culture flourishes. When these elements weaken, cities dissipate and eventually recede out of history.” A virtue of Mr. Kotkin’s brevity is that the reader acquires a more urgent sense of how many once really great, triumphant cities have, indeed, “receded out of history.”

In Chapter 14, Mr. Kotkin gets to his own chosen place of residence, Los Angeles, and it is clear he regards it as the pinnacle of the modern city. “Many in Los Angeles’s political and economic elites embraced this more sprawling notion of urbanism. The city’s form did not develop by happenstance; it was designed to be an intentional paradise. In 1908, for example, Los Angeles created the first comprehensive urban zoning ordinance in the nation, one that encouraged the development of subcenters, single-family homes, and dispersed industrial development.”

L.A.’s form emerged initially from Henry Huntington’s magnificent Pacific Electric Railway, which soon enough was supplanted by Angelenos’ embrace of the private automobile: “As early as the 1920s, Angelenos were four times as likely to own a car as the national average and 10 times as likely as a Chicago resident.” As for today, “For modern cities, whether elsewhere in America, in old Europe, or in the emerging cities of Asia, Los Angeles now represented the prevailing form of urbanity, the original, as one observer put it, in the Xerox machine.”

Mr. Kotkin correctly notes that the model for Los Angeles was London. In the squalid industrial city, with its Dickensian “fogs” (moist air mixing with coal dust to form a fine soot that clung to everything and infected the lungs), the aristos kept to their country retreats while the bourgeoisie created simulacra of country-house living in their “cottages” and “villas” dispersed from Clapham to Twickenham to St. John’s Wood. At the same time, municipal administration in London adopted a highly decentralized model of “parish” governance. To this day, London retains its multicentric village quality. British social critics from Thomas Carlyle to H.G. Wells championed urban dispersal. (Much, though not all, of the decentralist theorizing bore a strong core of moralizing Medievalist Romanticism.)

Toward the end of his book, Mr. Kotkin notes the seeming rebound of several “global cities” – including New York, London, Chicago, and Tokyo – that successfully transitioned from a manufacturing-based to an information-based economy, with spectacular increases in inner-city property values reversing long-trend “declines.” He quotes urban historian Peter Hall, who recently wrote that “Neither Western civilization nor Western cities show any sign of decay.” But Mr. Kotkin counters this assessment by pointing out that “the ability to process and transmit information globally, and across great expanses, undermines many traditional advantages enjoyed by established urban centers.”

He writes: “The global securities industry, for example, once overwhelmingly concentrated in the financial districts of London and New York, had gradually shifted an ever larger share of their operations to their respective suburban rings, other smaller cities, and overseas.” Quoting H.G. Wells, Mr. Kotkin says the fate of our great cities, including New York, may be that of a “bazaar, a great gallery of shops and places of concourse and rendezvous.” Or, as Witold Rybczynski (who has blurbed this book) said not long ago, “We are all Venetians now.”

Mr. Kotkin even suggests that New York’s role as an artistic center is bound to be eclipsed by faster-growing, more economically dynamic cities and regions, for the reason that, historically, artistic centers have also been economic centers. Today, New York. Tomorrow … Phoenix? Yes, says Mr. Kotkin.

And then there’s the specter of terrorism.

Mr. Kotkin’s book suffers from some notable omissions. He fails to mention, even once, the work of Jane Jacobs, who has thought harder, more intelligently, and more originally about the economies of cities than any other living writer. He fails to mention, even once, oil. Given that the availability of oil may have a profound impact on future urban growth and may utterly undermine the sort of decentralized urbanism he admires, this omission is glaring.

Also, many of his facts are quoted from secondary and tertiary sources that are not even always about the subjects the facts refer to. For example, Mr. Kotkin blithely states that the skyscraper was invented in 1895. Well, that was news to me. I checked his note. He got that bit of information from an essay by Emmanuel Tobier, an economist whose work I admire, but not an architectural historian. The 1895 date is, of course, utter nonsense, as is his notion that “the key breakthrough came with the erecting in 1902 of the Flatiron Building.” In other words, Mr. Kotkin lacks any sense or knowledge of what the historian Donald J. Olsen calls the “City as a Work of Art.” Too often, champions of urban decentralization are aesthetically numb.

Yet Mr. Kotkin’s is a bracing book, one whose theses and arguments must be taken seriously and dealt with by anyone who wishes to forecast the urban future, or even describe what is going on today.