ancient cities

86 Bruges, Belgium
political, and personal service functions of a city
are available. A Broadacre City version of Social
City would look vastly different, however, taking
on Wright’s characteristics of low-density development
dominated by single-family detached homes
instead of pockets of higher-density modules.
Application to the American Twenty-First-
Century Landscape
Since Wright’s death in 1959, many of his Broadacre
City ideas have come to be realized but not in the
form he advanced. Extensive freeway networks
crisscross the countryside, and expansive suburbanization
consumes vast areas of land at low densities.
Much of the built environment is now characterized
more as “exurban” sprawl than suburban
sprawl. Such community services such as fire and
police protection, new road construction, water
and sewer, and garbage collection are much more
expensive to provide in exurbia than in alternative
development patterns, such as Broadacre City.
Could the continued exurbanization of America be
managed better through Broadacre City?
Perhaps up to a quarter of American households
live in exurban areas. These are areas where population
density (less than 1,000 persons per square
mile) falls below that able to support important
public utilities. Providing transportation and urban
services across large areas of low-density development
is very costly. Uncoordinated exurban sprawl
may weaken the economic efficiencies associated
with urban agglomeration and undermine the
socioeconomic well-being of both the city and
country. Broadacre City may be a solution to the
management of exurban development in America.
See also Suburbanization; Urban Planning
Further Readings
Arthur C. Nelson
Collins, George R. 1963. “Broadacre City: Wright’s Utopia
Reconsidered.” In Four Great Makers of Modern
Architecture. New York: Columbia University Press.
Fishman, Robert. 1977. Urban Utopias in the Twentieth
Century. New York: Basic Books.
Johnson, Donald Leslie. 1990. Frank Lloyd Wright
versus America: The 1930s. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Nelson, Arthur C. 1992. “Characterizing Exurbia.”
Journal of Planning Literature 6(4):350–68.
———. 1995. “The Planning of Exurban America:
Lessons from Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City.”
Journal of Architecture and Planning Research
12(4):337–56.
Nelson, Arthur C. and Kenneth J. Dueker. 1990. “The
Exurbanization of America and Its Planning Policy
Implications.” Journal of Planning Education and
Research 9(2):91–100.
Twombly, Robert C. 1972. “Undoing the City: Frank
Lloyd Wright’s Planned Communities.” American
Quarterly 24(4):538–49.
Br u G e S, Be l G i u M
Now a small provincial capital of the federal state
of Belgium, Bruges is significant for urban history
both for its status as a medieval commercial center
and for its rebirth as a destination for modern
tourists. From the tenth century, Bruges emerged
first as the residence and governmental center of
the counts of Flanders, then as a seaport and trading
center for materials that supplied the Flemish
cloth industry, and then for the finished product
itself. By the fourteenth century, the city succeeded
in making itself the sine qua non of northern trade
for nearly two centuries before reverting to a secondary
market and production center thereafter.
Bruges reached its economic nadir in the nineteenth
century, with little industry and a chronically
impoverished populace. Bruges was discovered
by devotees of European romanticism, whose
fondness for all things medieval transformed the
rundown city of neglected old buildings into an
outdoor museum visited by multitudes of tourists.
The powerful counts of Flanders of the central
Middle Ages established Bruges as a part of their
economic and political development of the pagus
Flandrensis, the heart of a realm that at its greatest
extent stretched as far south as Picardy and west to
Boulogne and Dunkirk. An important network of
fairs was one of their initiatives, as was an ambitious
program of land reclamation along the coasts
near Bruges. Bruges thus became a significant center
of transportation and exchange before 1200, as well
as a minor center of cloth production. But nothing
could have predicted Bruges’s rise to the status of
the first commercial center of northern Europe,