ASPHALT NATION: How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take It Back.<i> By Jane Holtz Kay</i> .<i> Crown: 394 pp., $27.50</i>

Jane Holtz Kay hates Los Angeles.

Hates it, hates it, hates it.

Well, actually, she doesn’t just hate Los Angeles. She rails vituperatively and voluptuously against most of the West--Phoenix, Las Vegas, Houston, Dallas, Seattle, Albuquerque . . . . She even despises significant portions of Portland.

Kay is an architecture critic who, from time to time, peeks out from her beloved Boston to recoil with loathing at everything that does not match 19th century urbanity. Her immediate problem is that all cities, throughout all of human history, have been shaped by whatever the state-of-the-art transportation device has been at the time. The twisted narrow streets of Boston, for example, are what you get when people in the early 1600s think they’re good enough for an age of horse-drawn wagons.

The state of the art for Los Angeles today is the automobile, the jet plane and the computer. Kay, unfortunately, believes that little, if anything, has gone right since the first Model T rolled off the assembly line in 1908. She is keen on few parts of the 20th century city. In “Asphalt Nation,” she explodes. She means to destroy once and for all the root of creeping Los Angeles evil--the car.

The world went to hell when people started living in “promiscuous disarray,” rather than in the tightly ordered and centralized fashion of Boston at the turn of the century. She even views southern New England triple-decker tenements as “building forms of variety and humanity” compared to the malls and megaplexes of today. She hates Holiday Inns; she abhors Wal-Marts. “Car-based design is impossible,” she avers. It causes that awful prospect, an “architecture without architects,” in which central government planning becomes “a charade.”

Who’s to blame? It is those 20th century promoters of individualism: “Dirty trucks, dirty diesels, dirty cars--and, of course, their drivers.” Kay wants to lead the revolution toward walking, biking, trains, buses--anything but the car.

There is a great deal of merit to her case. But her argument is undermined by her unwillingness to concede the slightest shred of rationality to any American who might find the automobile a reasonable solution to complex problems. If critical judgment involves making distinctions between good, better and best, Kay is curiously uncritical.

In the first half of the book, right next to a serious discussion of damage to Earth’s atmosphere, she blames cars for encouraging bad posture. It’s like listening to the victim of a bad divorce who can’t stop explaining how the ex is responsible for every evil since Eve bit into the apple.

This lack of judgment is a shame because Kay does have a contribution to make. Los Angeles, being a relatively new city, still has a lot of evolution in front of it. In the last generation, it has been at the forefront of the biggest revolution in 150 years in how people live, work, play, pray, socialize and die. It is now marked by a brand-new kind of urban core outside the 19th century downtowns. I call them “edge cities.” Look around. There are 26 of these huge job magnets throughout the Southland, from Pasadena to West Los Angeles. Each is bigger than downtown Memphis. The South Coast Plaza-John Wayne Airport area of Orange County is greater by any urban standards--tall buildings, bright lights, cloth napkin restaurants, 21st century white-collar jobs--than downtown Minneapolis.

These edge cities are spectacularly successful by any standard that can be measured in dollars. The key question is whether they will ever become good places for civilization, soul, identity and community.

This is where Kay fits in. She, of course, reviles these edge cities and wishes them off to perdition. But ironically, the second half of her book undercuts her core argument. It is a catalog of reasons to be guardedly optimistic that edge cities, like all other cities throughout history, are capable of evolution.

Kay contributes to the future direction of Los Angeles by researching its choices. Kay, of course, would hate this read of her book. She does not wish to make a contribution to the evolution of edge cities. She ridicules the idea that it is possible. She wants to smash Los Angeles, not incrementally improve it.

But the people whom she admires are more visionary than she. Take Peter Calthorpe of Berkeley, one of the leading lights of “the new urbanism.” She quotes him, approvingly, as saying that if he could do just one thing, he would make “granny flats” legal. They can become offices for start-up businesses. They can even house granny. They were common in 19th century downtowns and could make a huge contribution to the social and economic mix of emerging edge cities like Riverside or San Bernardino tomorrow, if zoning codes could be rewritten to make them legal.

More seriously, this book will rapidly seem quaint because of Kay’s failure to look forward to the changes of the 21st century. According to William Mitchell, dean of architecture at MIT, there are almost a hundred forms of real estate that are facing competition from cyberspace, from supermarkets to universities to malls to office parks. If he’s right, not only are we heading into a new urban realm that will be as unlike the 20th century as our era is unlike the 19th century, but we may have more obsolete asphalt on our hands than even Kay dreams.