Guardian: The mood among the planners, architects, and theorists gathered at the International Conference on Climate Change and Urban Design in Oslo last September was, despite the heavy gray autumn skies, quite buoyant, inspired by a feeling that their time had come. In the 1980s, exasperated by what they considered the excesses of American-style suburban development and its low-density “anonymous” subdivisions, and disenchanted by Corbusier-inspired large-scale high-rise housing blocks, they …