Dolores
Hayden’s 1995 work The Power of Place and
Max Page and Martha Miller’s Introduction to their 2006 edited essay collection
Bending the Future: Fifty Ideas for the
Next Fifty Years of Historic Preservation in the United States both examine
the potential of the historic preservation of spaces and landmarks to cultivate
senses of belonging and cultural citizenship among diverse urban populaces. In
particular, these authors recommend a preservation and historic acknowledgement
of spaces that represent the lives and experiences of working-class and
non-white communities. As these works suggest, a more diversified and inclusive
historic preservation will help to communicate the roles of varying communities
in shaping and reinterpreting the built environment in order to meet the needs
of their changing present.
These
works contribute to a larger historiographic discussion on historic
preservation and the role of the built environment in creating senses of
belonging and collective identity among the populace. One such work that
contributed to these conversations is urban planner Jane Jacobs’ 1961 work The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
During the late 1950s, Jacobs argued for the vitality and cultural importance
of Manhattan’s urban neighborhoods as a means of combatting infamous New York
City developer Robert Moses’ massive urban renewal projects that sought to
upend many New York neighborhoods. In response, The Death and Life of Great American Cities argued that the role of
urban planner should be to use the built environment of city parks and public
buildings as a means of fostering collective neighborhood identities.[1]
While Jacobs was not a historic preservationist per se, her avocation of urban
designs that nurtured senses of communal identities and understandings remained
influential upon crafting inclusive urban preservationist designs. In 1966,
shortly after the passage of the National Historic Preservation Act, various
authors published an essay collection entitled With Heritage So Rich. This collection advocated for preservation
practices that provided historical understanding though the use of physical
sites.[2]
Robert Stipe’s 2003 edited essay collection A
Richer Heritage: Historic Preservation in the United States in the Twenty-First
Century provides readers with strategies to cultivate a more inclusive and
expansive twenty-first century historic preservation. Andrew Hurley applied
both Jacobs’ theories of the urban neighborhoods and the strategies of previous
preservation essay collections to the context of the historic preservation of
underserved postindustrial areas. According to Hurley’s 2010 work Beyond Preservation: Using Public History to
Revitalize Inner Cities, historic preservation and other public history
projects can cultivate attachments to place and senses of belonging in
neighborhoods struggling for economic revenue and city services. Such a process
aims to restore the prideful, collective neighborhood-based identities of which
Jacobs writes.[3]
Both The Power of Place and Bending
the Future pursue different strategies towards similar ends. Dolores Hayden
argues for the use and preservation of urban landscapes as a means of nurturing
the collective memory of the city. This process provides a sense of urban
belonging to marginalized groups often ignored by historical preservation
initiatives. In The Power of Place, Hayden
stresses that such a process involves both mapping political and cultural
narratives onto architecture and spatializing social history.[4]
For Hayden, historic preservation must emphasize sites of everyday
working-class life such as housing projects, factories, and union halls.[5]
By preserving and historicizing these sites, social histories embedded in urban
space that fosters a greater sense of community investment and interest in the
past emerge.[6]
For Dolores Hayden, the social history of public space is the best avenue
towards creating an inclusive and meaningful public history of the urban
environment.
Bending
the Future’s introduction takes a somewhat similar stance. Yet, unlike
Hayden, Page and Miller advocate for a series of measures that seek to improve
upon historic preservation techniques used since the National Historic
Preservation Act’s 1966 passage.[7]
Yet, as Hayden similarly showed, historic preservationists still struggle with
the act of preserving sites relating to the histories of people of color,
women, and LGBTQ communities. Scholars like Jamie Kalven argue that such
preservationist narratives should directly engage the ways that structural
inequalities are often expressed and reinforced by the built environment.[8]
Furthermore, Page and Miller argue that historic preservation can
simultaneously fight the gentrification-fueled displacement that often
accompanies recently preserved neighborhoods. In fact, scholar Graciela Sanchez
argues that historic preservationists in communities of color must also be
anti-gentrification activists in order to ensure that their historical work does
not have adverse effects.[9]
Such a conundrum represents an important challenge for preservations in an age
where “revitalization” is often synonymous with the displacement of
lower-income residents.
While Dolores Hayden specifically
argues for a place-based social history embedded within historic preservation
techniques, Bending the Future’s
introduction lists a series of points regarding approaches to the changing
field of historic preservation. While both authors address concerns over
gentrification occurring as a result of historic preservation, neither address
such issues in a manner that lists actual tactics for ameliorating these
unwanted outcomes. In an age where more urban neighborhoods are rapidly
becoming cultural centers for the wealthy, it is worth considering expanding
public history concepts of shared authority beyond crafting historical
narratives. In an era of gentrification, if historical preservation is to be
truly inclusive and beneficial to marginalized communities, it must be
accompanied by some organization or legislation designed to ameliorate the
harmful effects of capitalism. Historic preservations should not only involve
communities in preservation projects, but also be involved in advocating for
collectively-owned housing, community land trusts, heightened rent controls,
and tenants unions. While both works provide important analysis in terms of
creating more inclusive historical narratives through historical preservation,
it is important that such inclusivity remains in the neighborhoods that the
project represents. This is a task that involves more than simply history, but
activism as well.
[2] Max Page and Marla R.
Miller, “Introduction” in Bending the
Future: Fifty Ideas for the Next Fifty Years of Historic Preservation in the
United States, ed. Max Page et al. (Boston: University of Massachusetts
Press, 2016), 2.
[3] Andrew Hurley, Beyond Preservation: Using Public History to Revitalize Inner Cities (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 2010), ix-x.
[4] Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place (Cambridge, MA: The
MIT Press, 1995), 9-10.
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