Suburban Sprawl-Growing Sustainable Suburbs

You need differentiation to create value. Bethlehem has always been a place that differentiated itself from the suburban sprawl throughout the country. Today, we live in an area that has been surrounded by suburban sprawl from here to New York and Philadelphia, how do we continue to differentiate Bethlehem from the suburbs? These days it is hard to identify what is the new suburbs, the old suburbs, the nice neighborhood, or what is the slums. The suburban model has created a logistical nightmare on the East Coast filled with grid-lock traffic jams, strip malls, parking lots, and cookie cutter houses. Most of us see new cookie cutter housing developments as something that will expire in a decade to become old suburbs. Perhaps we should have stuck with with the European models that we know works with cities, towns, villages, and countryside.(notice that does not include suburbs.) This suburban model has diluted the value of many nice economic and cultural centers such as Bethlehem by spreading them out too thinly. What can we do to differentiate Bethlehem from the suburbs?