I'm going to check out Radiant City - looks very good. And very disturbing as well. The guy in the trailer put it well describing the sprawl: "soul destroying." The suburbs were a post WWII invention, and is where the baby boomer generation was raised. And this country took it and ran with it. No one knows their neighbors anymore. There is no sense of community here. The architecture is probably more a symptom than a cause, but the outward bleakness is a good indicator of the isolation that is so typical in America.
It is one reason, along with feminism, that I want to expat. Even if I moved a foreign wife here, it's still no place to have a family.