New England is celebrated for its picturesque, human-scale town centers - which is logical but something of a paradox, since our six tradition-steeped states pretty much stopped giving birth to any new town centers more than a century ago. The most notable exception is Mashpee Commons, in the Cape Cod town of Mashpee. Now 20 years old, this ambitious collection of stores, offices, housing, entertainment and public spaces - laid out like an old town center - is a reproof to the idea that town centers are strictly a thing of the past.

In the mid-1980s, Providence native Buff Chace had inherited a mostly flat stretch of land in Mashpee, 10 miles east of Falmouth, that included a dinky shopping center at a rotary. Chace had never liked conventional shopping centers. They seemed non-places to him - buildings of little character, sitting in uninviting expanses of blacktop. So he and his partner, Douglas Storrs, started altering and adding onto the undistinguished little center.

Their idea was to build a downtown by following all the "rules" (mostly unwritten) that traditional Cape Cod and New England downtowns had heeded. They constructed a network of narrow streets. Along the streets, they installed wide sidewalks. Abutting the sidewalks, they erected buildings two or three stories high, so that offices and apartments would be above the shops, adding variety and activity, and so that the buildings would be tall enough to give a sense of enclosure to the street. The feeling of enclosure - of being in a comfortably proportioned "outdoor room" - is one of the things that makes many streets in old cities and towns appealing.

The developers chose traditional styles for most of the buildings, but also hired architects who designed a number of stores in a more contemporary vein. Recently they've been planning to construct nearly 400 units of housing in two brand-new neighborhoods. A quarter of the housing is required to be affordably priced so that some of the workers at Mashpee Commons can live within walking distance of their jobs.

Block by block, year by year, Chace and Storrs expanded and diversified Mashpee Commons, all the while sticking to the idea that people should be able to do things on foot - get to stores, restaurants, movie theaters, doctors, the post office, the public library - a broad range of everyday destinations. They didn't ban cars, but they had them park at the curb - since on-street parking helps pedestrians on the sidewalks feel shielded from moving vehicles - or in perimeter lots that are better shaped than the oceans of asphalt at conventional shopping centers.

In their decision to revive a traditional, mixed-use form of development, Chace and Storrs were onto something important. Mashpee Commons became a much-studied example of how New Englanders can create compact places amid the sprawling, low-density development that's been the norm for the past several decades. When the mixed-use Storrs Center is built in Mansfield, it can trace some of its principles to the now well-established center at Mashpee.

It's impossible to create a center that pleases everyone. Some have groused that there are too many national chains at Mashpee Commons, and too many tourists arriving in SUVs. Mashpee is part of the Cape, which reflects contemporary America, both good and bad, so if you go to Mashpee Commons, you'll inevitably see consumerism on display, especially in the summer. Yet given the nature of our advertising-saturated culture and the obstacles to creating mixed-use, pedestrian-scale centers, what Chace and Storrs have accomplished is impressive.

Casual visitors may not notice all of Chace and Storrs' ingenious techniques, so I'll point out a few. Foremost is their method of accommodating small start-up businesses, the kind that can't afford large stores. The developers have found that national and regional chains are unavoidable, but at one edge of the retail area, Chace and Storrs went out of their way to attract independents by constructing a row of tiny, pitch-roofed, gray-shingled stores - very Cape Cod-like. These 16 stores are only 350 to 425 square feet each, a good size for mom-and-pop operations, some of which gradually grow into larger enterprises. The little stores provide a uniqueness that makes shopping interesting. There are doors at both the front and the back, so in warm weather the breezes blow through.

The little shops create a pleasant edge for the parking lot behind them. As soon as the shops were completed, people began walking to this northern end of the development more than they used to - in part because it had become a street with storefronts on both sides, an arrangement that people instinctively enjoy.

The developers placed a small post office in the center of Mashpee Commons, knowing that post offices generate many daily visits, which are good for businesses close by and good for fostering social ties, as people regularly see their fellow townspeople. The developers encouraged other civic uses such as schools, a church and a fire and police station. They paid the architectural expenses for designing a new public library, which fronts on the town common just up a slope from the center of Mashpee Commons.

They required chain operators such as CVS and Stop & Shop to occupy buildings better than the corporate standard. The CVS store, clad in pleasant red brick, features glass on more than one side, so the quality of light surpasses that inside a typical retail box, where artificial illumination takes the liveliness out of the atmosphere. Mashpee Commons and the adjoining North Market Street area, by the same developers, together meet many of the daily needs of the town, which had previously lacked a center.

New England stopped building town centers decades ago partly because automobiles spread activity out, and also because zoning ordinances separated differing uses and made compact, pedestrian-oriented places illegal to build in most jurisdictions. With perseverance, Chace and Storrs have demonstrated that the old way is both profitable and humanly appealing. It is worth bringing back, and not just on Cape Cod.

Philip Langdon is a member of the Place Board of Contributors and senior editor of New Urban News, a national newsletter on community design. He lives in New Haven and first visited Mashpee Commons in 1987.