Abstract
In their book, The Past and Future City: How Historic Preservation Is Reviving America’s Communities, Stephanie Meeks, president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation (the National Trust), and co-author Kevin C. Murphy, a speechwriter at the National Trust, seek to inspire a new generation of high-tech, grassroots preservationists. Throughout the book, Meeks and Murphy redefine the scope, methods, and goals of modern historic preservation, framing it as a tool citizen groups can leverage to move their communities toward economic development, environmental sustainability, and social justice. The authors celebrate new directions and coalitions for the movement while confronting lingering tensions and faults—including preservation’s relationship with gentrification and the movement’s past pattern of prioritizing White history when selecting projects.
The book contains seven chapters, along with a short introduction and conclusion. Chapter 1, “Downtown for the People: Competing Visions of the Ideal American City,” provides a brief overview of the modern American preservation movement. Meeks and Murphy deftly outline Le Corbusier’s Radiant City vision and the destruction wrought by Robert Moses’s renewal efforts before explaining the role Jane Jacobs and her contemporaries played in reshaping popular opinion about older buildings and neighborhoods. This chapter, the title of which is a nod to Jacobs’s (1958) pivotal essay “Downtown is for People,” sets a clear tone for the book: preservation is an effort best undertaken by groups of ordinary citizens, fighting against both the public and private sectors.
The storytelling nature of chapter 1 vanishes in the next chapter, the book’s biggest stumbling point. In chapter 2, “Older, Smaller, Better: How Older Buildings Enhance Urban Vitality,” the authors summarize research undertaken by the National Trust’s research group, the Preservation Green Lab. To its credit, the chapter provides a digestible overview on the strong relationship between diverse urban fabrics and desired economic, social, and environmental outcomes—thus providing lay preservationists with data to use in their own local preservation battles. However, the Preservation Green Lab’s selection of three large, economically secure, and increasingly global cities—San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C.—leaves the reader wondering about the broader generalizability of the chapter’s results for preservationists working in other contexts. Moreover, given that these three cities have experienced well-documented, rapid escalations in housing prices—and related increases in gentrification and homelessness—their selection as model cities does preservationists few favors.
Thankfully, Meeks and Murphy follow chapter 2 with the book’s most compelling chapters: chapter 3, “Making it Work for Your City: Unleashing the Power and Potential of Historic Fabric,” and chapter 4, “Buildings Reborn: Keeping Historic Properties in Active Use.” In chapter 3, Meeks and Murphy explain how modern descendants of Jane Jacobs use technology to overcome local power differentials, devise new funding streams, and create archives of open data for preservation purposes. The authors move from story to story of preservation success, each featuring a technologically savvy citizenry conducting surveys on thousands of parcels in a range of settings, such as fighting building demolitions in Detroit or creating a “treasure list” of properties ripe for restoration in Buffalo. In chapter 4, the authors argue that preservationists must move “beyond house museums” to save old buildings and their communities, and highlight examples of coalitions transforming schools and churches into neighborhood-serving shelters, performance spaces, homes, and offices. These chapters are fast-paced, with diverse sets of projects that feel more relatable and relevant to everyday life than the research discussed in chapter 2. Additionally, project locations in these chapters—ranging from Dallas, TX, to Milwaukee, WI, and Fredericksburg, VA, to Monterey, CA—make their lessons more generalizable to communities across the country than those presented in chapter 2. If Meeks and Murphy’s goal is to inspire a new generation of citizen preservationists to save old neighborhoods and buildings to benefit their communities, these chapters go a long way toward accomplishing their task.
The next two chapters confront two important criticisms of the preservation movement: first, that cities and towns across the United States have used preservation as a tool to construct historical narratives that erase contributions made by people of color and second, that there may be relationships between preservation, segregation, and gentrification. The authors explore each in turn in chapters 5, “Our Diverse History: Toward More Inclusive History and Communities,” and 6, “Mitigating the Great Inversion: The Problems of Affordability and Displacement.” After acknowledging the harm that the preservation movement has caused and encouraging preservationists to “tell the whole story” of their local history in chapter 5, in Chapter 6 Meeks and Murphy elevate a preservation model meant to protect an entire community—that is, not just physical buildings but also the businesses and people that give them life. Preservation, they argue, does not lay the groundwork for gentrification but is instead a tool that citizens can use to fight gentrification—especially when it is coupled with a selection of complementary incentives and protections for older business and residents. Unfortunately, the examples included in chapters 5 and 6 are thin—a jarring contrast to the myriad of projects presented in previous chapters.
Thankfully the book closes on a high note in chapter 7, “The Greenest Buildings: Preservation, Climate Change, and the Environment.” Here, Meeks and Murphy argue that restoring older buildings is “greener” approach to environmental sustainability than pursuing new construction, thanks to both the environmental cost of gathering materials for new construction and the superiority of locally oriented, vernacular construction techniques that older buildings exhibit (e.g., cardinal orientation, thick walls, window alignment).
Overall, Meeks and Murphy present a compelling case for historic preservation for a new generation of activists. Through an engaging style that weaves data together with storytelling, the authors acknowledge preservation’s past faults while suggesting a reprioritization of the everyday; among the book’s opening examples is the preservation of a pickle court in an immigrant neighborhood, a choice that sets the book’s tone. Yet the book’s structure undercuts its power at times. After the exhilarating success stories of chapters 3 and 4, addressing gentrification in chapter 6 seems like a depressing afterthought—one that may be too easy to dismiss. And by tacking on a brief section (chapter 5) to address links between preservation and constructed narratives of white supremacy, the authors—however inadvertently—underscore the idea that diversity can remain an afterthought in preservation circles.
In passages throughout The Past and Future City, and taking cues from Jacobs, Meeks and Murphy position historic preservation as a movement at odds with municipal and state authorities; these latter groups are cast as elites. This aligns nicely with recent work arguing that marginalized communities can use preservation as a tool for “counterpublic” identity construction and reproduction (Roberts 2018). Laying urban ills popularly linked to historic preservation (e.g., gentrification, displacement) at the feet of politicians and the public sector also fits neatly with a class of recent research that considers government policies as stage-setters for gentrification (e.g., Moskowitz 2017). Yet, state and local government agencies are critical for preservation, too—a fact that citizens new to preservation might not realize after reading the book. Formally adding a site to the National Register of Historic Places requires collaboration with State Historic Preservation Offices (or an equivalent group like a Tribal Historic Preservation Office); these offices and the roles they play in preservation are not discussed in the book. Moreover, many of the policies the authors argue can prevent gentrification—such as economic development incentives targeted toward older businesses or residential tax abatements for grandfathered residents—may require either new policies or policy realignment from local government officials, too. Thus, while the book contains success stories for advocacy groups to emulate and potential policies that cities and towns could adopt, there is little to help community group effectively work with or forge partnerships with government. The lack of such frameworks may prime citizen groups for counterproductive adversarial relationships while also overselling the institutional ease of pushing preservation projects through.
Citizen activists may want to pair The Past and Present City with works that offer cautionary tales like Goldstein’s (2017) more recent The Roots of Urban Renaissance: Gentrification and the Struggle over Harlem, which details how, over the course of a few decades, preservation-oriented community development groups—including those that identified as radical in the 1960s—themselves became unwitting players in neighborhood change and gentrification.
Throughout The Past and Future City, what could have read as a laundry list of potential policies, successful coalitions, and GIS strategies instead comes across as a widely accessible pep talk with pithy quotes. If it has a fault, it may be that Meeks and Murphy—in their effort to appeal to Millennial preservationists—are too inspiring, and lack the words of caution that more critical, institutionally oriented works consider.