Broadacre City

Broadacre City is the plan for an ideal community that was designed by architect Frank Lloyd Wright. In direct contrast to fellow architect Le Corbusier's highly urban “Contemporary City for Three Million Inhabitants,” Broadacre City represented Wright's posturban, agrarian vision of the United States. The name Broadacre City was derived from Wright's notion that each citizen should own at least an acre of land. Wright had been working on the project, originally called “Usonia” after his name for its citizens, for quite some time when the 1929 stock market crash convinced him that the country was in need of drastic change. Wright's first public introduction of Broadacre City was during the Kahn Lectures at Princeton University in 1930, and he offered a detailed exposition of his plan in The Disappearing City, first published in 1932.

In The Disappearing City, and a later revision published in 1958 as The Living City, Wright contrasted what he saw as the inhuman, congested conditions of modern urban life to his own lowdensity city form. To Wright, modern cities were plagued with traffic jams, petty crime, and slums, and their architecture had lost all sense of human proportion, while contemporary uses of industrial technology alienated human beings and made them servants to machines. Rather than abandon technology, however, Wright proposed that it be put to better uses. Technological advances like automobiles and personal aircraft allowed people to traverse great distances quickly, telephones reduced the need for personal contact, and improvements in lighting, heating, and refrigeration methods made it possible for people to spread out across the land. These advancements enabled the decentralization of the city over a vast area, and the creation of Broadacre City, a city in the country. Rather than live in cramped urban quarters, families would own between 1 and 5 acres of land, and the farming and light industry that they undertook on their land would be the center of social and economic life. In Wright's view, this radical decentralization of the city would lead to the dissolution of “mobocracy,” a resurgence of individuality, and a revival of Jeffersonianstyle democracy based on individualism. Individual ownership of physical and intellectual property would eliminate the systems of “rent” of labor, property, and ideas that [Page 97]caused people to live vicarious lives and lose the ability to see themselves as productive individuals. Wright felt that when every citizen owned, lived on, and worked on his or her own land, the modern fragmentation between things like urban and rural life, physical and mental labor, and work and leisure would be eliminated.

True to his desire to see a resurgence of individualist democracy, Wright envisioned a nation with a very limited government. He did see the need for a uniform system of money or some form of social credit, but he saw no need for a large national government. Instead, the primary locus of government would be the county, and the most powerful official in Broadacre City would be the county architect. Trained in the principles of organic architecture, the county architect's primary responsibility would be road design, a central component in Wright's vision. This radical decentralization extended to education as well. Elementary schools would have no more than 40 students, classes would have no more than 10 students, and the curriculum would include cooking, gardening, and drawing. Large universities, too, would be eliminated and replaced by small institutes, fellowships, and style centers like Wright's own Taliesin.

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