Most sources on the web are unhelpful because they only talk about it as applied to architecture, but he had a bunch of ideas about urban planning (or rather, anti-urban planning) that are much less well known and get drowned out in the noise.

Here's one half-decent article I've managed to find about it

The TL;DR is that Wright liked the idea of basically replacing cities with endless suburbia/Jeffersonian hobby farms interspersed with small towns, such that everything would be self-contained/self-sufficient. Or something like that, anyway. (In hindsight, the legacy of Wright's idea is that American society took the "spread everything out" part without the "and get rid of cities" part and invented disastrous suburban sprawl.)

Anyway, I think "usonian" is being used here to allude to the idea of failing to provide sufficient Federal funding for infrastructure because of misguided individualism, maybe?

[–] xohshoo@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

agree, it's a Frank Lloyd Wright thing maybe mixed with Esperanto. It comes from abbreviating United States of North America (USONA), then because it's popularity around the time of it's invention by Zamenhof, was adopted into Esperanto as the name of USA, somewhat modified as "Usono" https://eo.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landnomo_kaj_lo%C4%9Dantoj_pri_Usono

I'm not sure if @sovietsnake@lemmygrad.ml is an esperantisto or if it's used in other contexts as well

[–] sovietsnake@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 1 year ago

Check my comment, I explained better.