John Nolen: Planner for the New South

Abstract

John Nolen's three decades of planning consultation to many southern cities, beginning with his role as advisor to the Charlotte, North Carolina, Park and Tree Commission in 1905, illustrate how planning was a continuing influence throughout the heyday of the New South movement. Yet Nolen's planning in southern cities also offers a window into the broader American urban planning process at a time when public institutions had not yet established a dominant role in regulating urban development. Nolen's work speaks directly to the current-day dilemma of planning as a visionary art or as a rational policy process. His planning model for cities reflected the unique melding of these conflicting crosscurrents in planning theory and was a model that appealed to the urban aspirations of the New South. By examining Nolen's southern planning practice in two cities where he had a long association—Charlotte and Roanoke, Virginia—it is possible to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the guided decentralization model that he offered to the region during its formative urban development era.

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