Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City

“America’s 1785 Land Ordinance divided most of the country’s unsettled interior west of the Ohio River into a neat grid of townships 6 square miles in size (each containing 36 square-mile parcels of land for the kind of agrarian, land-owning society Thomas Jefferson envisioned). If you drive across – or fly over – the Midwest today, its effects still linger in all those perfectly perpendicular roads and square farms. Frank Lloyd Wright took the geometry of this rural grid even further in his vision for a utopia with each family living on an acre of its own. That level of density would have essentially spread suburbia over the entire country.”

The Evolution of Urban Planning in 10 Diagrams

Albert Pope: Blue Archipelago

BLUE ISLANDS. Among the many maps that were produced by a stunned liberal electorate in the aftermath of the 2004 presidential election, the so-called cartogram enjoyed particularly wide circulation. The cartogram distorts the size of an area based on its population so that the greater the population density of a region, the larger its representation. The county-by-county cartogram of the election results revealed a direct relation between population density and votes cast for Republican and Democratic candidates. Democratic votes clustered in blue islands of high density surrounded by a sparsely populated sea of red space. The map was startling because it revealed an apparently deep ideological divide between cities and their surrounding regions – a divide that is clearly being driven by an urban dynamic. From a political standpoint, this divide came as a total surprise. Given the evolution of the city over the past 50 years, however, it should have been expected. That it was unanticipated is perhaps as telling as the existence of the islands themselves.

THE REGIONAL MODEL. Only closed cities are cut off from their surrounding regions; open cities are not. The blue islands are startling because they provide stark evidence that we live in closed cities. This evidence flies in the face of some of the most basic assumptions about our present modes of urbanization. The urban fabric is no longer seamless. Over the past half century, new development has jumped beyond the perimeter of the existing city and has formed into discrete suburban clusters. In the interstices of these clusters, open space has emerged and this open space has often been associated with the qualities of natural environments. In one sense, the fabric of the city has been dispersed. In another, urban fabric has been infiltrated by open space. This trend has led to the assumption that the closed, monolithic forms of the traditional city have been opened up to the natural environment.

Blue archipelago, Albert Pope (Log 5, 2005)