[wburg]

The idea isn't to "urbanize the suburbs," but to stop building new suburbs on greenfields. Natomas was a mistake, it's true--but we're stuck with that mistake, the best lesson we can learn is to stop repeating that mistake with new suburban growth on the freenfields we have left. New suburban development takes development energy away from central cities by dispersing it into the periphery--if you limit the growth into the periphery, that energy is naturally diverted back to the center. It also means there is less need to subsidize central city growth because the artificial subsidy of greenfield-to-suburb sprawl is choked off.

I agree with what you say about putting transit-oriented (walkable) development near transit. If such developments don't start out with the transit first, they end up as car-centric neighborhoods like Laguna West, or North Natomas. If light rail to the airport had been built before housing and commercial in Natomas, it might look very different today (although it wouldn't be any less susceptible to floods.)

Instead of an interpretive farm museum, the farmland on the urban boundary should be used for farming--that way, instead of a fake petting-zoo type farm, kids can visit an actual working farm! And while community gardens are a fun hobby, it is far more energy-intensive for city residents to drive to Natomas to plant a community garden (requiring multiple auto trips for a few basketfuls of produce) than it is for a large-scale farm to ship trucks of vegetables to cities, and the city resident to walk to the store and buy 'em.