Routinely dismissed as 'mere sprawl', the suburban city is the black hole of recent urbanism, absorbing human energy and resources but seldom revealing the principles of its operation.For the past 20 years Lars Lerup has explored Houston as its prototype. In this book he broadly approaches this complex conurbation so as to develop a vocabulary to interpret its urban forms. Loved by its inhabitants, defined by huge potential and difficult problems, Lerup's Houston is a test-case for twenty-first-century urbanism and our understanding of unregulated cities everywhere.