One on One: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City

In the early 1930s, Frank Lloyd Wright began developing plans for a suburban network of family-run farms centered around a communal market—a vision that would later evolve into his concept for Broadacre City. Collaborating with retail and warehouse consultant Walter V. Davidson, who specialized in “motion studies” to improve industrial efficiency, Wright applied similar principles to the design of farms, optimizing the placement of livestock pens, greenhouses, silos, and packing facilities. Although these farms were never realized, their ideas lived on in his model for Broadacre City. Debuting during the Great Depression, Broadacre City shared ideals with New Deal initiatives like the Resettlement Administration’s Greenbelt Towns program, which sought to revitalize rural life through planned suburban communities. While Wright even pursued a potential commission through Eleanor and Franklin D. Roosevelt, historians have since noted the exclusionary nature of such programs, particularly toward African Americans—raising complex questions about who Wright envisioned as the inhabitants of his idealized city.