Atlantic Crosser. John Nolen and the Urban Internationale
Résumé
Nolen is a major figure in US city planning history, and has received a wide attention since the days when John Hancock brought him the tribute of his alma mater through a PhD from University of Pennsylvania. Nolen, on the same footing as Geo B Ford or Frederick Law Olmsted, is one of those that Mel Scott depicted as "founding fathers" in his history of American city planning , and Donald Krueckeberger coined him as the "most productive city planner of his time". More severe judgements have also been pronounced, such as those by Marie Christine Boyer or Margaret Crawford, who stressed the business side of Nolen instead of his progressive committments. I am not here to carve another bust of Nolen as an American planner, but rather to use John Nolen as a window on the outside world. All those who wrote on Nolen mentioned his wide participation in the international milieu of town planning. Indeed, this was the cause of the interest I paid to the man of Cambridge, Masachussetts. The Italian historian Giorgio Piccinato was among the first historians of town planning to insist on the existence of a "town planning international society" in the years before World War 1. This society was embodied in overlapping international congresses, exhibitions, networks of correspondences, translations of major books and friendships. Nolen was a figure in all those dimensions.
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