Suburbanity of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City seems anomalous in twentieth century urban history. First presented in 1930 as a critique of existing American cities, the project developed into a program for territorial decentralization over the ensuing decade. Although Wright’s often elliptical rhetoric can seem disengaged from urban discourse, this article argues that Broadacre City was based on prevailing suburban trends that it attempted to intensify. In doing so, the article makes two significant claims about Wright’s work. The first is that Broadacre City was not a utopian master plan but rather a hermeneutical framework for managing socio-spatial change. The second is that the project was as critically attentive to changes in and around American cities as it was uncritically informed by existing forms of privilege and prejudice. If Broadacre City appears to be better grounded in urban history as a result, then its historiographic status needs to be revisited.