“Historic preservation preserves outcomes, but not the processes by which we got the outcomes.”

I wish I had said this, but it was someone I follow on Twitter, here. That’s a really great way of distilling it. Historic preservation preserves the form of a place as it appeared at a particular moment in time—and often enforces that form permanently, with regulations on shutters and windows, paint colors, etc. You’ll see folks on Twitter talk about living in aging bungalows that they’re not allowed to gut and renovate or simply tear down, because they’re in a historic district. I’ve seen the argument that we should keep historic designation for individual structures, but scrap the idea of historic districts. That makes sense to me.

But the real point here is the contrast between the strict preservation of whatever happens to be considered “historic,” and the incuriousness as to how those buildings and that urban fabric actually came to exist in the first place.

I remember going to a Strong Towns talk back in 2019, which was the first time I heard a full accounting of their philosophy. I remember these pictures that Charles Marohn put up on the projector, of his own small city in Minnesota. They’re in this article at the Strong Towns website. They show the incremental growth of the city, from dirt streets and wooden shacks, to a middle form with more permanent and ornamented buildings, to a fully recognizable classic American town, with grand civic buildings and a bustling Main Street.

The thesis here is that what we now look at as a Main Street/small town/ “fully built-out” neighborhood isn’t actually a thing anyone has ever built, per se. It’s rather a mature form of an idea, the evolution of an urban place according to a sort of cultural DNA—the art of city-building. Historic preservation locks this final form in amber, but has little or nothing to say about how to actually develop more of these sorts of well-loved places, or how they came to exist.

It treats them as museum exhibits—scarce, slightly mysterious artifacts which can no longer be made. In treating entire urban settlements as products or manufactured things, it misunderstands how urban settlements come to exist and what they are.

Historic preservation is like not cutting down a mature tree. But the bigger question is how do we grow more mature trees? Understanding preservation to be at odds with development is like believing that keeping mature trees is at odds with planting baby trees.

The sticking point, of course, is that most new development doesn’t imitate the kind of mature old-fashioned urbanism we generally like, because—perhaps—it can’t really be imitated. I think there’s something to the idea that NIMBYism is driven by a lack of faith in the quality of what we build today—that if development does mean “cutting down mature trees” and replacing them with poor imitations of mature trees, why should we be for it?

My immediate answer, as you know if you’ve been reading for awhile, is that ultimately housing people and letting cities grow in the way we do today is more important than the longer battle of restoring the traditional body of city-building wisdom. Nonetheless, I think we need to do that.

And if we won’t live to see those final forms—those grown-up trees? Let me end with the conclusion from another piece on a similar theme:

And speaking of trees, this reminds me of a story I read once. People will say, “Nothing we build today is as nice as this old stuff.” But who knows what a century will do to perceptions? I don’t remember the details, but two men are planting a tree, and one of them observes, thinking the act is pointless, that it will take the tree 100 years to mature. “Then we had better plant it as soon possible.”

Related Reading:

Preservation Through Growth

Signs of Change

Urbanism Without Cities?

Thank you for reading! Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to help support this newsletter. You’ll get a weekly subscribers-only piece, plus full access to the archive: over 900 pieces and growing. And you’ll help ensure more like this!

Share