In a lecture on the relation between regional and city planning given at MIT in 1929, Nolen proposed that work should be done to produce town, city, metropolitan, county, state, national, continental, hemisphere, and world plans – though he did not expand on how these plans were to be made, much less carried out.1 As he considered ever larger scales of work, his emphasis on expert control and the education of public opinion in favor of expertise also increased. In his response to a paper entitled “Financing Decentralization” given by C.B. Purdom at the 1925 International City and Regional Planning Conference, Nolen claimed that

even in the smallest countries there is plenty of land for cities, and there is plenty of money to do everything that can be done on an economic basis (as city planning can be) and the law and the constitution itself will change with human requirements just as soon as public opinion is favorable to such change. Our problem is the problem of better planning, better organization and better control. The form and color of life of all are dependent to a great extent upon what we can do to meet the new conditions in cities. No other infl uence, except perhaps, that of education, can do so much to transform the conditions of life for the good as can be done through better methods of planning and developing existing towns and cities and laying out new communities more in accordance with the requirements of the modern art of town and city planning.2