Reevaluating The City

Broadacre City: Frank Lloyd Wright's Broadacre City, a motherboard. "(...) the future city will be everywhere and nowhere, and it will be a city so greatly different from the ancient city or any of today that we will probably fail to recognize its coming as the city at all." Frank Lloyd Wright.

This image (and the quote) comes from Portuguese architect Hugo Ferraz's "Urbanamentes" blog. In his post, Ferraz examines the similarities between Wright's plan for the future city and a computer's motherboard. The motherboard and the unbuilt plan both show a distribution of physical forms by function. Kunstler might add that the two are similar in that they are both unnatural, dehumanized, and alienating. The motherboard could just as easily be held up to the contemporary city, where the mechanization of movement has become an exact science - in the form of institutionalized city planning.

I found the quote from Wright, which Ferraz uses to close his post, particularly fitting as we find ourselves trying to recover from an economic meltdown by injecting public money into public works. As funding becomes restructured, so must our policies towards development and construction. The field of regional planning has been growing for the last several decades, but as we prepare to dive head first into this new wave of development, we can no longer think of our cities, suburbs, and towns as isolated from one another. (I am thinking specifically of the Northeast Corridor, which runs roughly from Boston to DC.) We must, as Wright proposes, recognize them as components of the future city.

For more on Regional Planning, visit the Regional Plan Association, a non-profit regional planning organization that operates in the Tri-State area in the spirit of improving "the quality of life and the economic competitiveness of the 31-county New York-New Jersey-Connecticut region through research, planning, and advocacy" as well as to "mobilize the region's civic, business, and government sectors to take action."

Just for fun, another image from Ferraz's blog: Broadacre City II