John Nolen, Landscape Architect and City Planner

Over the course of his career, Boston-based landscape architect John Nolen (1869-1937) and his firm completed more than 450 projects, including comprehensive plans for 29 cities and 27 new towns. In this insightful biography, R. Bruce Stephenson analyzes Nolen’s progressive experiments, illuminating his planning principles and their connections to the European garden city and discussing the potential of Nolen’s work as a model of a sustainable vision relevant to American civic culture today.

R. BRUCE STEPHENSON is director of the Planning in Civic Urbanism masters program at Rollins College, a landscape design consultant, author of Visions of Eden: Environmentalism and Urban Planning in St. Petersburg, Florida, 1900-1995, and contributing scholar to the Florida Humanities film series on community, Imagining a New Florida.