To city planners, landscape architects, and historians, John Nolen is as important a figure in design and planning as was Frederick Law Olmsted, Jens Jensen, or Lewis Mumford. Scholars, however, have only recently begun to explore the extensive Nolen archives. Relying on rarely published materials from these archives and other sources, John Nolen and Mariemont: Building a New Town in Ohio details the planning and initial development of the community of Mariemont, outside Cincinnati. Hired by philanthropist Mary Emery, Nolen worked to transform farmland into a community of mixed-income housing complete with commercial space, playgrounds, and a village green.
This is the first book to examine the planning and building of Mariemont and one of the few books to focus on the process of American town planning in the early twentieth century. Regarded in the 1920s as an exemplar of planned communities, Mariemont remains one of America's most livable suburbs and has drawn great interest from the New Urbanism movement.