Cities 07

Sean McPherson OBE #4 (The Low Density Model)

Wright’s Broadacre City envisions technology as way to ruralize a community while maintaining urbanesque mixing. Broadacre City can be seen as a way to mask the planning of a city by spreading it out. Wright writes “in Broadacres all is symmetrical but it is seldom obviously and never academically so.” Broadacre marries the metropolitan services and cultural amenities of a city (zoo, stadium, water, electricity) with the bucolic majesty of rural life. Wright’s ambition is to solve the ills of the modern city with the inventions of the modern city. The “general mobilization of the human being” in the form of automobile permits the modern man to spend different parts of his day in different density. Standardized machine-shop production will now permit what they originally ended, the individual artisan. Wright’s ideals of little things, “little farms, little homes, little factories . . .” is a discourse against both the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. “The landlord is no happier than the tenant,” writes Wright.
Broadacres is a classless society that does more to upset the financial fabric of society, as we know it than Le Corbusier’s “Contemporary City” by a long shot. Corbusier’s city still involves a workforce that uses transit into the city and he plans for luxury housing. Corbusier’s model expedites the capitalist workforce and does little to address how the residents of this new city would life. I believe Corbusier doesn’t delve into this because I don’t think he sees it changing in that many foundational ways. The only real claim is that they would live more efficiently. In contrast Wright saw the burgeoning technologies of his day as an invitation to slow down the pace of life. Success is “excess” to Wright and Broadacres is a leveling tool, a way to miniaturize the means of production.
Stylistically I see Corbusier and Wright as defending style through equally draconian measures. Wright sees style as “organic” character. Wright’s arbiter of style is the county architect. This county architect really seems like the city officials who tell residents of nice neighborhoods to put numbers up on their garage and keep their grass to cut. Wright might be so convinced of the easy enforcement of a stylistic ethos because he enforced one so effectively for over half a century as America’s leading architect. Towards the end of his piece Wright wrote, “unwholesome life would get no encouragement”. Wright’s utopian view of society is hard to compare next to Corbusier’s because it is like comparing a blueprint to a manifesto. Wright saw the world change under his blueprints and Corbusier had no such luck. His ideas had to be watered down and adjusted by the real city designers of his time. But in their writing I believe it is Wright who needs to reassess the powers and potential of a city design. I question whether the classless, socialistic society that Wright laid out would be as respecting of his vision as the high-class curators of the rest of his career.
Corbusier’s vision has the hunger of someone who hasn’t been listened to properly. In the preface to his piece he explains that he is answering questions so can “have the happy assurance that his [reader’s] astonishment will no longer be stupefaction nor his fears mere panic.” Corbusier and Wright’s plans are both universal, needing little to no adjustment to work in different. Both plans do put great demands upon the land beneath them. It is in fact in this great demand that they find their universality. These plans would theoretically work anywhere, not because of their malleability but because of their unflagging commitment to their own ideals.
Both plans share to differing degrees a redistribution of land. In a sense Wright granting every household at least one acre gains the same effect of guaranteeing every household no acres. Land ownership is muted as a part of the social hierarchy due its redistribution (or in Corbusier’s case, it’s reappropriation for public use).
Wright’s plan called for an end to the compartmentalization of work and took a page out of the anarchist Kropotkin’s playbook by anticipating a mixed workday filled with both manual and intellectual work. This flies in the face of Corbusier’s desire to “classify these divisions”. Although Corbusier’s thrust for classification in this section is geographic his desire for people to have a defined job and location of job is inherent in the divisions he sees in the “contemporary” city.
The difference I find most simple between Corbusier and Wright is the directionality of their expansion. Wright’s expansion is horizontal, with society reaching out across the landscape and remaining intimate through the use of technology. Corbusier sees cities expanding horizontally and remaining intimate in the way humans have remained intimate since they have been in cities, proximity. Both of these desires can be compared against Wirth’s assertion that physical proximity can create larger gulfs between people. I doubt Wirth would defend the telephone as a better means of creating intimacy between people. I think the truth is that intimacy between cells, regardless of whether these cells are families in a small apartment (Corbusier) or families on an acre (Wright) is low on the priority of both of these planners.