Reaching out and reining in: Four proposals for planning community

Abstract

This paper compares two sets of planning paradigms in the Soviet Union and the United States. The projects analyzed are Mikhail Barshch and Moisei Ginzburg's Zelenyi Gorod ("Green City”) of 1930, Frank Lloyd Wright's Broadacre City of 1935, the anonymously planned Soviet mikrorayon, and William Drummond's competition entry for a neighborhood unit in Chicago, completed in 1913. The first two projects both propose dissolving the large city and dispersing the population across the land, while the second two envision cities composed of hierarchically structured communities with shared facilities. The paper highlights both the striking similarities and differences between the projects created in two very different national contexts.