Judgements of Broadacre
[Essay originally written for CRP 2000, “The Promise and Pitfalls of Contemporary Planning” at Cornell University, taught by Professor Jennifer Minner, September 2019.]
Frank Lloyd Wright’s utopian vision, “Broadacre City,” has been held on a pedestal as an urban ideal as well as disapproved of for its extreme and controversial plans. Broadacre City uses decentralization and privatization as tactical methods to advance individualism and self-autonomy in Wright’s ideal society. Both these methods and these goals can be praised or criticized, depending on the opinions of those studying the revolutionary plan and design.
As explained by Fishman in Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century (1977), Broadacre City is a planned reflection of Wright’s dominant values: extreme individualism, autonomy, and self-reliance. This stands in opposition to other urban visionaries, such as Ebenezer Howard, who planned with minds toward cooperation and community. Where Howard and similar planners might design a city that revolves around the community as its center, or its core, Wright’s Broadacre City revolves around the individual and the singular family unit.
Wright used decentralization as a tool to accomplish this goal: logically, separating the typical urban agglomeration into isolated, individually-owned plots of land would facilitate a shift in society from one which is based around the community to one which is based around the individual. Therefore, although decentralization was promoted, to some degree, by both Howard and Wright, Wright’s design for Broadacre City took decentralization much further than Howard’s Garden City. He did not only aim to decentralize the dense city into smaller communities, as Howard did; he aimed to decentralize it to the level of the “individual family home” (Fishman). This aim is reflected in the physical plan of Broadacre City.
In Broadacre City, every citizen has rights to a minimum one acre of land (or more), meaning that everyone spends part of their time working this land and part of their time working “in the small factories, offices, or shops that are nestled among the farms” (Fishman). Modernity and machinery would make it such that the systems of industry in Broadacre City would not require more than half a day’s work from each of its citizens in order to function efficiently. Evidently, the individual is strongly tied to his or her own individual plot of land, and life is therefore centered around ownership of this land and the activities which occur there. In other words, life does not revolve around community involvement or socialization. Rather, life revolves around maintaining one’s own land and operating within the family unit which resides on that land.
Wright believed strongly in the power of individual ownership, and such decentralization would promote (or perhaps enforce) it. Of course, this decentralization had to be physically supported by a transportation network which allowed the citizen to navigate this dramatically sparse landscape, when it was necessary to leave the individual plot of land. Indeed, a network of superhighways would connect these scattered homesteads, and each citizen of Broadacre City would own a private automobile in order to effectively make his or her way around the area. Wright saw this culture of car use as a positive reflection of many of the core elements Broadacre City was meant to promote: individualism, individual ownership, and progress via the use of modern technologies.
Typically, a design or plan for a city or area (implemented or otherwise) will fall short in the face of issues or consequences that were not planned for: in other words, the side effects. That is, a plan’s flaws are usually found in unintended consequences, not in what is explicitly implied within the plan. As mentioned, the central themes behind Broadacre City can be summed up in two words: individualism and decentralization. These were Wright’s primary goals, and perhaps his motivators for planning his visionary city; the “perfect” society, his utopia. Further, Wright’s design was, arguably, successful in meeting these goals. Critics rarely assert that Broadacre City is too centralized, too communistic, or too dense. However, what is seen as the primary strength of Broadacre City to Wright and to his followers can be judged as its primary weakness to others. Indeed, Broadacre City is something to be feared, a dystopia, for those who view individualism and rampant decentralization as dangers to society and to the environment.
While Wright’s vision for Broadacre City did include democratic civic institutions, they would be decentralized in nature; “decentralized across the city so power would not overly concentrate in any one place” (Leon). Robert Putnam has argued that true democracy can only occur through real-world, socially involved, in-person civic engagement across a wide variety of settings. Because of the necessity for “in-person” interaction, Putnam implied that this type of civic involvement can only thrive if encouraged by the built environment: specifically, it would be encouraged by a built environment which facilitates communication, intimate socialization, and other such interactions among the citizens of the area. Following this logic, Wright’s model of Broadacre City would not allow for any highly functioning democracy to occur. Instead, Broadacre City “would be a society couched behind keep-out signs,” a structure enforced by the city’s mass privatization and lack of common spaces (Leon). Wright might argue that socialization would still occur consistently and effectively in Broadacre City via modern communication technologies. However, Putnam and others would likely deem this type of socialization as inefficient for facilitating fulfilling and effective democracy.
Possibly the most evident flaw in Wright’s urban vision is that it is not really “urban” at all. Its decentralization moves far past cities one might describe as simply being “less dense,” instead being so sprawled out that it lacks any remnant of density that usually demarcates our urban centers. Broadacre City is completely car-dependent, meaning that citizens hoping to go practically anywhere outside of their own plot of land are forced to drive there in a private automobile. In the midst of the present climate crisis, most would argue that such an oil-dependent arrangement is far from the environmental ideal. Instead, today’s environmentalists tend to value denser urban living, the kind described by David Owen in his “Green Manhattan”. This style of living promotes travel by foot and by bicycle, and, when necessary, by public transportation such as bus and subway. Most would argue that this arrangement is substantially more environmentally friendly than dependency on travel by private automobile. From a purely aesthetic stance, one might argue that Wright’s Broadacre City, with its large, private, undeveloped plots of land and open space, appears outwardly to be more environmentally friendly than concrete jungles such as New York. However, Broadacre City’s car dependency means that it would be more accurate to picture the area as one “blanketed with grey asphalt parking lots” rather than a lush, green landscape (Leon). For example, in Los Angeles, America’s stereotypically-car-dependent sprawled city, 60% of the land is paved over in order to accommodate the culture of car use.
Frank Lloyd Wright’s visionary plan for “Broadacre City” has been described by supporters as a dream society which promotes independence, space, and a strong family life as its foundations. However, these values fall short of facilitating a “utopian ideal” when one understands individualism and decentralization as threats to a functional and environmentally friendly society.
Endnotes
Fishman, R. (1977). Urban utopias in the twentieth century, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Gray, J. (2018). Reading Broadacre. Retrieved from https://franklloydwright.org/reading-broadacre/
Leon, J. K. (2014). What Broadacre City can teach us. Retrieved from https://www.metropolismag.com/cities/what-broadacre-city-can-teach-us/
Owen, D. (2004). Green Manhattan: Everywhere should be more like New York. In The New Yorker (p. 111). New York, NY: The New Yorker.
Putnam, R. D. (2000). Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community, New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.
