The nodes of Wright's net of places in Broadacre City are most of them single family homes, which radio and transport link together and to larger commercial and cultural nodes. Wright's individualism and his economic ideals pushed him to ward such small nodes, but today we see that more density is needed in the local node, that community needs more kinds of interaction than his isolated farmsteads would be likely to supply.
There needs to be more local spatial density as well as density of links across nodes. We might reimagine Wright's proposals with larger, denser nodes, though still small by city standards. We might remove his insitance that each family have its own farmland, while still encouraging local agriculture. We might, as he does not, include walking among the modes of mobility and connection. Then his vision would somewhat begin to resemble the network of walkable dense communities in New Urbanist regional proposals, and in William Mitchell's recomendations.
In doing this, however, we would have given up one thing that Wright took as essential, namely the economic independence afforded each family by its self-sufficient farmhold. Though he wanted mobility and networked transportation, Wright was also fighting against our integration into economic networks -- most critics ignore this aspect of his ideas but perhaps we should be more sympathetic with his complaints in our time when the network that frees us in so many ways also encourages massive centralization in many economic spheres.
(c) David Kolb, 1 August 2001