On an 80-acre former tree farm in the Front Range city of Longmont, Colo., developers Kiki Wallace and Dale Bruns are attempting to build an alternative to sprawl. Wallace and Bruns believe there is a better way and it can be discovered by a return to the traditions of village life in Europe, or in America back in 1870 when Longmont was founded.

Longmont still has a handsome and vibrant Main Street with buildings which date from the founding days of the city.

The magazine and book shop on Main Street serves the city's cosmopolitan tastes, offering everything from Garden Design to Yoga Journal to Fresh & Tasty (the women's snowboarding magazine). But away from Main Street, Longmont loses its character and, with its tract houses, becomes indistinguishable from anywhere else in suburban America.

Wallace and Bruns are about to change all that.

The finishing touches are now being put on the first houses in their development, called Prospect, which sits on the southern edge of Longmont on U.S. Highway 287. Wallace, who inherited the land from his father, was casting about for an architect to design housing to put on the site when he came across a page one Wall Street Journal profile of Andres Duany, the Miami-based guru of traditional community design. Wallace called Duany the next day to hire him.

Prospect will test the proposition that design determines behavior.

It will be the antithesis of 1960s-style suburbia. Residents will not need a car to go to the store or to their work: retail stores and home offices will be an integral feature of the village. The developers have planned commercial space and hope that a few small-scale employers such as machine shops will locate in Prospect, providing jobs within a five-minute walk of home.

To be sure, some residents will jump in their cars and commute to Denver to their jobs, but many will work close to home or at home.

Ultimately, Prospect will have 505 units on 320 lots and will be home to about 2,000 people. All its houses will have handsome front porches so Prospecters can watch their neighbors stroll by.

Says Bruns: "We're building a village, a subdivision, a sustainable living environment. exactly the way humanity has lived for the last 2.000 years. If you look back in history, people lived in villages, they lived in social groups, they'd look out after each other. They'd know their neighbors. All those social elements have been lost in a neighborhood such as Rock Creek [the far-flung 1960's-style development just south of Boulder]."

Symbolizing Prospect's antagonism toward the automobile culture, no garages will face the street as in many American suburban developments. This will be a village for walking, not just for driving.

Prospect won't conform to the post-World War II ideal of a big house with a big yard. Lot size for each house will be smaller than found in most contemporary developments. The typical house will have 5,100 square feet of living space on a 7,000 square foot lot.

About a third of Prospect's 80 acres will be open space, (this includes front yards). There will be nine parks which are intended to take the place of big yards.

Prices will range from $150,000 to $500,000. "We want and we require all income levels in this development," says Bruns. "We want to have a kid that's available to mow the neighbor's lawn. We want people that are willing to baby-sit the neighbor's kids."

Some units will have apartments built over the garages, so that renters can afford to live in the development, adding to the diversity of incomes and families.

Wallace emphasizes that he and Bruns are not merely overseeing the building of houses but "designing the public realm." He argues that "in suburbia you lost the public realm, all they designed was the interior of the houses."

Wallace and Bruns are going against the grain in many ways, not least of which is their attempt to diminish the need for the automobile.

Cheap gasoline and the American ethic of personal mobility are two of the chief contributors to sprawl.

With gasoline prices lower in real terms than at almost any time since the end of World War II, Americans can drive their 20 miles-per-gallon Ford Explorers from their home to the mall and back to their heart's content. They need not walk to the store.

Despite these deeply ingrained habits, Wallace and Bruns are betting that there is a pent-up demand for village life and that they can create a viable alternative to most of what is seen across the American landscape.