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The problem with practical arguments
DOI link for The problem with practical arguments
The problem with practical arguments book
The problem with practical arguments
DOI link for The problem with practical arguments
The problem with practical arguments book
ABSTRACT
In 1928, Nolen asked if he could change the title of a lecture he was to give at Harvard from “Garden Cities and other Satellite Cities” to “New Communities Planned to Meet New Conditions”, as he would rather “make the lecture a practical argument for the building of new towns and satellite communities, and not dwell particularly on Utopias”. In addition, he wrote that he would rather not “make the treatment of the subject either theoretical or historical”.1 It did not seem relevant to Nolen to discuss that the Garden City ideal as initially put forward by Ebenezer Howard was intimately connected to a political proposal about reorganizing the relationship between capital and the landscape as a means of addressing economic and environmental inequalities and only secondarily a proposal about the technical resolution of distributing categories of use throughout the regional landscape in response to processes of industrialization. This emphasis on technical proposals, while downplaying the political nature of the problems he wished to address with them, is characteristic of Nolen’s career.