McHarg held that technical planning tools were useless without changed land values

Evidence

From hard experience, McHarg knew that many of the boosters of Design with Nature underestimated the difficulty of changing the postwar pattern of suburban growth. The key to “sensible” building was not simply new analytical techniques. To use the new tools wisely, McHarg believed, developers, planners, and citizens needed a new set of values. They needed to reconsider the relationship between human communities and the nonhuman world. They also needed to confront what McHarg called “economic determinism” – the idea that the only function of land was to provide profits. Those kinds of intellectual shifts would not come easily. — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 716

Categorization

• XREF: McHarg’s ‘economic determinism’ critique of land parallels the commodity-view-of-land thread in the property/LGST course. — connects to: McHarg’s appeal lay in promising environmental fixes without wrenching social change — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 714; Postwar land-use activism uniquely grounded protection in ecological process arguments — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 718