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In the past few years, Vauban has become a well-known niche community, even if it has spawned few imitators in Germany. But whether the concept will work in California is an open question.

More than 100 would-be owners have signed up to buy in the Bay Area’s “car-reduced” Quarry Village, and Mr. Lewis is still looking for about $2 million in seed financing to get the project off the ground.

Members of the group studied the streetscape, the golf course, the spa, the cybercafé, the health care amenities and the design of the single-family homes at Sun City Festival, a 3,000-acre, planned community for people over 55. They commented on the cleanliness and orderliness of it all.

The 25 Chinese who toured the Del Webb development were not seniors planning their retirement but government officials and their spouses, a couple of architects and a banker. Their mission: study American suburbia with an eye toward replicating it back home.

For good or bad, the USA's suburbs have become a living laboratory for the world. Developing countries contending with explosive population growth and economic expansion are looking here for hints about how to manage growing cities. For many, modern suburbia — a largely American concept and lifestyle for more than 50 years — is a nirvana worth emulating. Others want to avoid it.

The push is on to inspire developing countries to do what more American communities are doing: steer away from sprawling, cookie-cutter subdivisions popularized after World War II and create sustainable communities that will not deplete natural resources.

That includes developments built around mass-transit stations to reduce reliance on cars and projects that mix homes and businesses so that people can walk from home to stores and other services.

The first true suburb was born in the 1830s outside Manchester, England, Lang says. It was Victoria Park, a gated community of luxury homes that now is part of Manchester. About 20 years later came the first U.S. suburb — gated Llewellyn Park in West Orange, N.J., about 12 miles from Manhattan. Streetcar suburbs followed, first along the route of horse-drawn streetcars and later along rail corridors such as Philadelphia's Main Line.

After World War I, pedestrian-oriented suburbs flourished, including the Country Club Plaza district in Kansas City and Beverly Hills. Suburban expansion came to a standstill during the Great Depression and "the great burst comes after World War II," Lang says.

Tract-style subdivisions dependent on the automobile flourished. The most famous is Levittown, on New York's Long Island. Then came larger, 1960s-era split-levels and colonials on cul-de-sacs.

Within 20 years, suburbs exploded in the booming Sun Belt around Dallas, Atlanta, Phoenix and other fast-growing cities.

Then the craze for large luxury homes — dubbed McMansions — pushed development to the farthest fringes of metropolitan areas, where land was still cheap and plentiful. That helped spark an anti-sprawl fervor still alive today that has the backing of many environmentalists, preservationists, health professionals, farmers and big-city mayors.

Suburban sensibilities began to change.

Town centers designed to mimic small cities sprouted in suburbia. New light-rail lines were built and transit-oriented developments along the tracks followed. More people embraced "new urbanism," a movement that strives to capture the essence of turn-of-the-century communities. Central cities enjoyed a renaissance as young professionals and empty-nesters embraced the urban lifestyle.

Today, the dialogue about suburbs among urban thinkers around the world is intensifying largely because of universal concern over global warming. There is worry about traffic congestion and air pollution. That's why designing suburbs that require residents to drive to get anywhere is losing relevance.

For many developing nations, however, the suburban ideal is stuck in circa 1980: a sea of lookalike single-family homes and shopping malls on the edge of the city. It's a model that many Americans increasingly are rejecting.

"Most intellectuals say it's horrible. Most environmentalists say the same thing," says Nora Libertun de Duren, urban planning professor at Columbia University and an expert on suburbs in developing countries. "But developers say it's good business, and architects say it's good business."

China, where major cities are choking on stifling pollution, is striving to build the world's first sustainable city — Dongtan, which broke ground last summer. Designed by a London-based global consulting company and built on an island outside Shanghai, Dongtan, ultimately to house 50,000, will ban cars that pollute (even hybrids), grow its own food, recycle almost everything — including wastewater — and create its own energy from wind, the sun and human and animal waste.

"The Chinese are very interested in doing the latest and most interesting things," says Paul Lukez, an architect from Somerville, Mass., and author of Suburban Transformations. "There's a recognition by the government that something needs to be done. … If something is cutting edge, whether it comes from the United States or Europe, they want it."