METROPOLIS UNBOUND: THE NEW CITY OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

The big dty," Frank Lloyd Wright announced prophetically in 1923, "is no longer modern." Although his forecast of a coping age of urban decentralization was ignored by his contemporaries, we can now see that Wright and few fellow-prophets understood the fragility of the great behemoth - the centralized industrial metropolis - that seemed to embody and define the modernity of the twentieth century. These capital cities of the industrial revolution, with New York and Chicago at their head, were built to last. Their very form, as captured in the 1920s in the famous diagrams of the Chicago School of Sociology, seemed to possess a logic that was permanent. At the core was the "central business district," the skyscraper locale of wealth, power and sophistication; surrounding the core was the factory zone, the dense region of reinforced concrete factories and crowded workers* housing; and finally, a small ring of affluent middle class suburbs occupied the outskirts. These were the triumphant cities whose allure was still draining the countryside and small towns of the world of their populations, catapulting millions into those urban- industrial centers that were the heartland of modem life.

But modernism is a process of constant upheaval and self- destruction. Just when the centralized metropolis was at its zenith, a set of powerful social and economic forces was combining to create an irresistible tide of decentralization that would tear asunder the logic of its tight-knit circles and distribute its prized functions over whole regions. The urban history of the last half-century is a record of this superficially, the process might be called "the rise of the suburb." The term "suburb," however, inevitably suggests the affluent and restricted "bedroom communities" such as New York's Scandale or Chicago's North Shore that first took shape on the edge of the nineteenth century metropolis. These nineteenth century suburbs established the model of the single-family house on its own landscaped grounds as the ideal middle-class residence, just as they establish-

FLUX 1 Spring 1990