index

Wright's Broadacre City

click on images for full-size:

Wright sketched several pictures of Broadacre City, and with his students built a large model showing what a typical area might be like. Some views can be found on the web through Google's image search.

The most complete early evocation of a new kind of dispersed place was Frank Lloyd Wright's Broadacre City attempt to re-form urbanity into a low-density spread of individual residences and de-centralized production and commerce. Wright's ideas remain one of the few wholly positive visions of suburbia. Broadacre City was no formless sprawl; it mixed its functions carefully, and it was to be supervised and planned by county architects. It was to bring independence and mobility in the escape from crowding, traffic problems, and big capital.

Wright's utopia epitomizes the positive values of the radical decentralization (which we still mistakenly call suburbanization) that has actually taken place in regions throughout the world since the 1920s: freedom from excessive density and inhuman crowding; freedom for the individual family house to expand on its own ample land; freedom of movement based on the superhighway and the automobile. But Broadacre City also bears witness to the costs of decentralization: near-total dependence on the automobile, a pervasive privatization and loss of public space; and above all the fragmentation of "the urban" into endless sprawl that endangers the very union with nature it was intended to promote. Fishman 1997, 15

Wright's ideas remain a significant and useful point of reference.