Abstract
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City is an audacious plan to dismantle or abandon all existing cities. Predicated on the notion that each person or family is entitled to the use of at least an acre of land, this radically egalitarian plan is the platform to achieve his overriding purpose—the nurturing of individuality. Whereas the material prerequisites attached to Broadacre City may be admirably democratic, in terms of politics, the chapter argues, Broadacres’ citizens are distressingly disempowered. In the event, the great cities of America were not leveled, but the “horizontality” of his vision, suburban sprawl, did come to pass, and, instead of Wright’s promised incubator of individuality, America more often received a built environment of mind-numbing sameness.
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Notes
- 1.
A good example of Hegel’s dialectical thinking, since we are talking about social theory, can be found in his Philosophy of Right, where he conveys his readers from the “simple unity” of the family, to the extreme “particularity” of civil society; however, we learn that a nobler synthesis is required to do justice both to human beings’ need for unity or belonging and their desire to develop their individuality. For Hegel, the answer is the modern state, which, he claims, provides both a national identity, the moment of unity, and creates institutions and laws to protect particularity (Hegel 1967, 110–125).
- 2.
“As physical fear of brutal force and any need of fortification grow less,” argues Wright, “so the ingrained yearning for the freedom of the mobile hunter, surviving, finds more truth and reason for being than the stolid masonry or cave dwelling defenses erected and once necessary to protect human life and now slumbering in the manufacturer, the agrarian and the merchant. Those defenses, in any case, modern science and war have made useless and a man’s value may again depend not so much on what he has but upon what he can do” (72).
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Roulier, S.M. (2018). Democracy and Individuality: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacres and the Burbs. In: Shaping American Democracy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68810-7_5
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