When architects, designers, and planners map out the physical space of our urban and regional geography, they also map out the discursive space of our everyday lives. This paper is an exploration of the rhetorical norms implicit in contemporary urban design. I examine three theories of the "good city": Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction, and Peter Katz's The New Urbanism: Toward an Architecture of Community. I close by (...) proposing a set of civic problems shared by designers and rhetoricians. (shrink)