Which of the following is closest in meaning to the underlined word "detractors " in PARAGRAPH FOUR?
Passage 2 Until a decade or two ago，the center of many Westerncities were emptying while their edges were spreading. This was not for thereasons normally cited. Neither the car nor the motorway caused suburban sprawl,although they spend it up: cities were spreading before either came along. Norwas the flight to the suburbs caused by racism. Whites fled inner-city neighborhoodsthat were becoming black, but they also fled ones that were not. Planning andzoning rules encouraged sprawl, as did tax breaks for home ownership - butcities spread regardless of these. The real cause was mass affluence. As peoplegrew richer，they demanded more privacy and space. Only a few could afford thatin city centers; the rest moved out. The same process is now occurring in the developing world，but muchmore quickly. The population density of metropolitan Beijing has collapsedsince 1970，falling from 425 people per hectare to 65. Indian cities arefollowing; Brazil's are ahead. And suburbanization has a long way to run.Beijing is now about as crowded as metropolitan Chicago was at its most closelypacked， in the 1920s. Since then Chicago's densityhas fallen by almost three-quarters. This is welcome. Romantic notions of sociable，high-densityliving -notions pushed，for the most part，by people who themselves occupy rather spacious residences- ignorethe squalor and lack of privacy to be found in Kinshasa, Mumbai or the othercrowded cities of the poor world. Many of them are far too dense for dignifiedliving, and need to spread out. The Western suburbs to which so many aspire are healthier than theirdetractors say. The modern Stepfords are no longer white monocultures，but that isprogress. For every Ferguson there are many American suburbs that have quietlybecome black，Hispanic or Asian，or a blend of everyone. Picaresque accounts of decay overlook thefact that America's suburbs are half as criminal and a little more than half aspoor as central cities. Even as urban centres revive，more Americansmove from city centre to suburb than go the other way. But the West has also made mistakes，from which the restof the world can learn. The first lesson is that suburban sprawl imposes costson everyone. Suburbanites tend to use more roads and consume more carbon thanurbanites (though perhaps not as much as distant commuters forced out by greenbelts). But this damage can be alleviated by a carbon tax，by tollroads and by charging for parking. Many cities in the emerging world havefollowed the barmy American practice of requiring property developers toprovide a certain number of parking spaces for every building - something thatmakes commuting by car much more attractive than it would be otherwise.Scrapping them would give public transport a chance. The second is that it is foolish to try to stop the spread of suburbs.Green belts, the most effective method for doing this， push upproperty prices and encourage long-distance commuting. The cost of housing inLondon, already astronomical， went up by 19% in the past year，reflecting not justthe city' s strong economy but also the impossibility of building on its edges.The insistence on big minimum lot sizes in some American suburbs and ruralareas has much the same effect. Cities that try to prevent growth through greenbelts often end up weakening themselves, as Seoul has done. Awiser policy would be to plan for huge expansion. Acquire strips of land forroads and railways, and chunks for parks，before the city sprawls into them. New York's19th-century governors decided where Central Park was going to go long beforethe city reached it. New York went on to develop in a way that they could nothave imagined, but the park is still there. This is not the dirigisme of thenew-town planner-that confident soul who believes he knows where people willwant to live and work，and how they will get from oneto the other. It is the realism needed to manage the inevitable. A model ofliving that has broadly worked well in the West is spreading, adapting to localconditions as it goes. We should all look forward to the time when Chinese andIndian teenagers write sulky songs about the appalling dullness of suburbia. - AUrbanites
- BProponents
- COpponents
- DSuburbanites