Historic Preservation and the Livable City

By Eric W. Allison and Lauren Peters

For both the preservation professional and urban planner, this book shows how preservation is a key to the creation of livable cities. The author Eric Allison, the founder and coordinated of the graduate historic preservation program at Pratt Institute in New York City, offers tools and case studies that preservationists and planners can learn from in implementing preservation projects or plans in cities large and small.  This book is a must read for anyone working in or interested in these fields and the creation and maintenance of livable cities.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Dec 20, 2010
• ISBN: 9780470900758

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

WHAT THIS BOOK IS ABOUT

New ideas require old buildings.

Jane Jacobs¹

This book describes the relationship between livable cities and historic preservation. For many people, including some planning and preservation professionals, historic preservation and livable cities have no relationship. This book will demonstrate to you that they do have a relationship—an important one—and that the two fields, far from being incompatible or in opposition, can be used together to create and maintain cities people want to live in.

This, more than any time before, is the Age of Cities. Although cities have been the centers of civilization for millennia, the United Nations reported in 2008 that, for the first time in history, more than half of humanity lived in cities. Our ability to create cities that are not only comfortable, but also inspire us and connect us with our history and our future, is important to more than 3 billion people now living in cities. This number is estimated to grow to 5 billion by 2030. The Millennium Project, sponsored by the World Federation of UN Associates, lists making cities more livable as one of the top ten goals rated high in importance, acceptability, and possibility for the year 2050.²

Historic preservation can play a key role in this challenging but doable project.

Planners often divide cities into two categories: growing cities and shrinking cities. Growing cities have vibrant economies and people want to live in them. Shrinking cities have stagnant, dying economies and hemorrhage people.

Detroit, which once had a population of 2 million, now has just over 900,000. It loses 10,000 people a year on average, and over half the building lots within the city limits are listed as vacant or empty—either an abandoned house or a lot that used to have a house. An enterprising farmer grows hay on what was once a residential street not far from downtown.

THE ECONOMIST’S TEN TOP LIVABLE CITIES IN 2010*

Detroit’s problems are the consequence of the move to the suburbs that began after World War II and the loss of the major manufacturing enterprises, especially automotive, which supported its economy. Other cities, though, have suffered suburban flight-led declines in population and the loss of major industries and yet have recovered or minimized the damage. The studies of why some cities win and some lose have led to the concept of livable cities. Our understanding of what makes a city survive reflects what should always have been obvious: People tend to live in cities that attract them and not in cities that don’t.

EXAMPLES OF CRITERIA FOR LIVABLE CITIES

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It’s not just the economy. It’s a whole range of factors. Often, as Richard Florida has shown, it’s the people who bring in the economy, including attracting or starting new businesses, rather than the reverse.³

According to MAPI,⁴ in 2006 manufacturing accounted for 13 percent of the U.S. economy, down 9 percent since 1995, part of a continuing decline from the peak in the early 1950s. The shift to services from manufacturing has also led to a shift in the nature of many jobs. At one time, people moved to where the jobs were. Many of those were in industrial cities with huge factory complexes. Today, the reverse is often true: Companies move to places where the people live who have the skills they need. More and more often this means places that are livable, for example Silicon Valley, or Austin, Texas, or Portland, Oregon.

Silicon Valley thrives because it is a place that people who can work almost anywhere want to work.

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The Orpheum Theater in San Francisco is both a cultural and historical resource.

Photo Credit: Brian Wolf

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One common factor in livable cities is culture. It’s no coincidence that many of the smaller cities that score high in livability are college towns. Colleges often provide theater, orchestras, and other cultural activities. It’s been said that people like to live in cities with opera houses not because they want to go to the opera but because they like the cachet of living in a town with an opera house. Supporting the arts, whether it’s a performing arts center in San Francisco or the downtown music scene in Austin, Texas appears to be critical to perceptions of livability. It is in this realm of culture that historic preservation makes its contributions to livability.

Historic preservation brings economic advantages that go beyond the often-mentioned tourism and these are discussed throughout this book.

There is also a psychological element as well. Just as livable cities need to be perceived as being safe, so also they need roots.

In Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America, and What We Can Do About It, Mindy Fullilove talks about the lasting trauma in Brooklyn resulting from the move of the Dodgers baseball team to Los Angeles and the destruction of Ebbets Field three years later. The loss of Ebbets Field, she writes, was a tragedy that could not be repaired: it changed Brooklyn forever.⁵

She goes on to ask how Brooklyn, which would be the fourth largest city in the United States if it were still an independent municipality,⁶ could be so affected by a sports club moving and a quirky old stadium being demolished. It leads her to the conclusion that places—buildings, neighborhoods, cities, nations—are not simply bricks and mortar that provide us with shelter . . . The cues from place dive under conscious thought.⁷

It has been said that people like to live in places that have opera houses like the Orpheum Theater, even if they don’t go to the opera.

Photo Credit: Brian Wolf

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The idea is not new. Jane Jacobs, a long-time resident and advocate for her Greenwich Village neighborhood, was outraged as urban renewal wiped out parts of her community while plans envisioned even more destruction. Greenwich Village was, and is, one of the most storied historic neighborhoods in New York City. In her best-selling book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, she pointed to the planning profession to account for destroying what it was supposed to be improving. Her point was that it was in the heart of the traditional neighborhoods of the city that what we now call livability was generated, and that the new modern towers in the park developments alienated people from each other rather than bringing humanity together.

Built in 1926, the Orpheum Theater has gone through two major renovations to restore it to its past glory. It is a San Francisco historical landmark.

Photo Credit: Brian Wolf

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Six years after Death and Life was published, Greenwich Village was protected as an historic district.

The historic heritage of a city can also help define it. The historic architecture of San Francisco, for example, is iconic. It represents what San Francisco is as a city to tourist and resident alike. Historic preservation contributes to the city’s idea of itself.

Many misconceptions persist about historic preservation: that it is a luxury, that it is elitist, that it causes gentrification and displacement. None of these beliefs is necessarily true.⁸ Even where gentrification takes place in older neighborhoods, whether designated as historic districts or not, planners, by coordinating their efforts with that of preservationists, can ensure amenities such as affordable housing are included in plans for the protected areas.

Ebbets Field was the home of the Brooklyn Dodgers. At the time it was torn down, it still looked much as it does in this 1913 photograph.

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As to preservationists being an elitist group unconcerned with the fate of neighborhoods, the truth is that those pursuing the protection of historic neighborhoods are most often the residents of those neighborhoods. While organizations like UNESCO and the World Monument Fund make headlines with preservation and conservation efforts at Ankor Wat in Cambodia or in rebuilding the medieval city wall in Cairo, the mainstream of preservation is at a different scale: homeowners concerned about threats to the character of their neighborhoods or residents fighting to save a treasured historic high school in the face of federal school construction grant programs that will subsidize new construction but not conservation and restoration.

The day-to-day work that helps cities be livable is overwhelmingly grass roots: neighborhood activists, homeowners, and community organizations assisted by preservation professionals. The locals who live there are almost always outspent by real estate interests and accused of being against needed economic development. Sadly, all too often, economic development means destroying the character of a neighborhood. In extreme cases, it means destroying the neighborhood itself.

A small plaque on these urban renewal apartments is the only reminder of a once-great ball field and a beloved team.

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Jane Jacobs’ work came from her experiences in her beloved Greenwich Village, now a New York City historic district.

Photo Credit: Tracy Marciano

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Adaptive reuse of historic buildings like this nineteenth-century school can make use of energy-saving construction such as original foot-thick masonry walls.

Photo Credit: Melissa Umberger

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Historic preservation can make major contributions to economic development and to more sustainability goals. This book shows that adaptive reuse and rehabilitation can produce more jobs and inject more money into the local economy than new construction. Preserving older buildings and neighborhoods can also be environmentally sound as well. Older buildings often have energy-saving features like the foot-thick masonry walls of many historic rowhouses that allow them to be brought to high standards of energy efficiency.

The truth is that historic preservation offers cities a major tool in working toward or maintaining livability. It can contribute to sustainability. It makes people want to live in cities where it is practiced. It fosters tourism and contributes to economic development. Like cities with an opera house, some people might prefer to live in sleek modern dwellings but they like having the historic buildings and neighborhoods nearby.

This book describes an important additional tool for the planner in the quest for livable cities. It offers preservationists a different way to see historic preservation that can lead to partnerships that will benefit all a city’s residents and visitors.

This book shows how historic preservation contributes to making a city livable and how the reader can make it happen. It explains how to start and how to continue, what techniques are available and how to use them, and what the results can be. It uses case studies of successes and failures and adds tools to make the livable city a reality.

CHAPTER 2

USING (AND NOT USING) THE PAST

Historic buildings provide the authenticity, the credibility, the sense of community, the sense of history that bind people in a fast-moving, 24/7 ever-changing world. They ground us. They provide a sense of self, a sense of identity in this creative age that we are moving into.

Richard Florida

Keynote address to the National

Preservation Conference, 2003

Why should anyone care about historic preservation? After all, it’s just a bunch of old buildings created for different times, made with old-fashioned techniques and old-fashioned materials. Historic buildings tend to be smaller than modern ones, so they represent a less efficient use of land. In a growing city, this space represents an opportunity to build more high-rises, to create more apartments and offices. Why not bulldoze them and build something shiny and new?

Even in a city that’s not growing, whether it is stable or shrinking, historic buildings represent a lost opportunity. Economic development always tops the list in discussions of a city’s needs. Everyone knows that economic development means tearing down the old and building the new.

Don’t they?

This book suggests that conventional wisdom is wrong. At best, it’s incomplete. Not so long ago, cities themselves were pronounced outmoded and unnecessary. Communications and computing allowed people to work anytime, anywhere, with no need to go to an office. People could live in forests or on top of mountains. So long as you could connect, you didn’t have to see anyone else.

Cities were notoriously dysfunctional. Infrastructure was breaking down. Crime was on the rise. The solution was to move away. Abandon the old and spread out, creating the new.

The inappropriate scale of this recent tower diminishes the sense of place of this nineteenth-century neighborhood and overshadows the Public Theater, formerly the Astor Library, which was the first free library in New York City.

Photo Credit: Tracy Marciano

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Like many predictions of the future, it hasn’t worked out that way. Cities did not go away. Instead, many of them are growing. Although cities have been the centers of civilization for millennia, the UN reports that, in 2008, for the first time more than half of humanity lives in cities. Previously written-off places like Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles are growing, attracting not only young professionals but retired couples who are selling their houses in the suburbs and moving back to cities that allow them to shop locally without needing to drive everywhere. Many people do telecommute but they are telecommuting from homes and apartments in cities. Far from being the solution, what is today called sprawl is regarded as a problem, for the car-oriented suburbs lack rapid transit and consume energy at higher per-capita rates. Cities can be more sustainable. According to a 2008 report from Brookings, New Yorkers produce the fourth smallest carbon per capita footprint in the United States.

Perhaps many of those who are concerned with the health of cities and the lives of their inhabitants are wrong about historic preservation?

Why do planners, politicians, and others concerned with cities have trouble with historic preservation? Perhaps it lies in the origins of the concept and profession of planning cities, of doing more than just platting out the lots on a greenfield site. Modern city planning began as an attempt to rationalize the city, to create a cityscape in accordance with the principles of modern philosophy in the late nineteenth century. Its purpose, exemplified by Burnham’s White City at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago, was to redesign the city to increase the health, safety, and welfare of its residents while satisfying the aesthetic senses by simultaneously creating the City Beautiful.

But even as practiced by Burnham himself, city planning was always about more than that. City planning has also been about economic development. It was and is about creating the conditions that will encourage growth and prosperity. Planners may or may not, depending on where they work, label their work economic development, but that work directly impacts their city’s economic health.

Planning as a field has a few blind spots. One of the biggest is the common assumption that economic development means getting rid of the old and building the new. Often the intention is a worthy one: more residential or commercial space. But in the complex environment of a city today this single-minded, one-size-fits-all approach is not enough.

The 1893 World Columbian Exposition was designed to exemplify the city beautiful.

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Some of the finest architects in the United States were invited to design pavilions, including this one, the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building.

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The Exposition demonstrated the principles of Beaux Arts architecture and rational city planning.

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In an age of knowledge industries, the businesses that generate taxes and jobs—and the workers who fill those jobs—are less and less tied to particular geographic locations. In response, cities are growing aware of the need to focus on what has increasingly been called livability.

Cities have always competed for economic development but often this involved playing up their geographic advantages. After all, shippers needed to be located in port cities, steel plants where there were supplies of iron and coal. Cities that were transportation hubs, like Chicago, could grow on the movement of goods from countryside to distant markets.

In the 1970s this began to change. Corporate headquarters moved to places that offered corporate executives lower taxes—both at the corporate and the personal level. (One study showed that, despite the justifications given in annual reports, most corporate headquarters moved to be near where the CEO lived or wanted to live.) In the United States, factories moved from north to south in search of cheaper labor. As the economy shifted from making things to providing services, the making of things moved right out of the country to even cheaper places. For cities, this could spell disaster. Services can be provided from anywhere.

To get and keep service industries, especially high-tech ones, many cities have come to the realization that both corporate executives and workers need to be targeted. It is not enough to just lure the corporation. As Richard Florida has pointed out, knowledge workers today—what he calls the Creative Class—can increasingly choose where they wish to work. Corporations need to be where knowledge workers are or wish to be. The two are entwined. All the tax incentives in the world cannot keep a knowledge business in a city if it can’t find the workers to staff it.

This fact alone leads directly to livability. A city people want to live in makes it easy for a company to attract the workers it needs.

This leads to another question: What makes a city livable?

LIVABLE CITIES

In 2007, a survey commissioned by The Economist, a British-based, business-oriented, internationally circulated news magazine, found that Vancouver was the most livable city in the world. The 140 cities in the survey were ranked in terms of stability, healthcare, culture and environment, education, and infrastructure.

What makes Vancouver a livable city? How about Pittsburgh, Melbourne, or Vienna, all high on livability lists? It is easy to see why slum-ridden cities plagued by widespread poverty, contaminated water, war, and terrorism hit the bottom of the livability list. But if you are the mayor of an industrial-age city struggling to retain residents and attract businesses and visitors, how do you create a livable city?

Vancouver lists the following key criteria in its successful quest for livability:

• A downtown transportation plan

• A network of bikeways and greenways

• Being on the leading edge of public policy and planning

• Innovative communications

• Neighborhood Integrated Service Teams (bringing together police, fire, engineering, and other civic agencies as a team to help find solutions to community problems)

• Sustainability, including a corporate climate change action plan and a plan for a model sustainable community

• Programs to support diversity, inclusivity, and accessibility

Encouraging bikers is one of the policies that makes Vancouver the world’s most livable city.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the City of Vancouver

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Other cities—and organizations advocating livable cities—offer different takes on the question. Often these different methods reflect the origin of the effort. For example, Tom Radulovich is executive director of Livable City, a San Francisco group that advocates for the creation of a balanced transportation system and promote[s] complementary land use that supports a safer, healthier, and more accessible San Francisco for everyone. Radulovich states that Livable City focused initially on transportation but, he notes, it has broadened its interest over the years into other aspects of livability, including housing policy, urban nature, green building, and urban design . . . We are doing a lot of advocacy and research on neighborhood planning.¹

Cities are complex entities and, while improving one aspect such as transportation is useful, to truly achieve livability requires a framework with attention to many factors.

As the body of knowledge developed in the area of livable cities has grown, certain criteria turn up over and over:

• Good transportation

• The importance of the type of urban fabric

• Walkability

• Mixed use

• A variety of neighborhood types and environments

• Sustainability

While no consensus currently exists about the details, the overall picture is clear. Large or small, cities that wish to be livable must pay attention to those things that make their citizens’ lives easier, that promote neighborhoods, that address transportation and infrastructure, and that pay attention to culture and the environment. As Partners for Livable Communities puts it: embracing technology, revaluating urban assets for the betterment of the community, and staying abreast of change that is taking place globally.

At one time these factors would have been labeled amenities. Today, anywhere in the developed world, they mean a city’s survival. It’s no wonder that in addition to livable city advocates, mayors, city planners, and policy makers are paying more and more attention to issues of livability.

WHAT CAN HISTORIC PRESERVATION CONTRIBUTE TO THIS CHALLENGE?

Some livable cities advocates and planners recognize that preservation of heritage resources contributes to the livable city. The LiveCom awards explicitly list Heritage Management as one of their criteria. Others list criteria that can often be filled by preserving historic neighborhoods including: walkability; appropriate human scale architecture; traditional neighborhood structure; distinctive, attractive communities with a strong sense of place. Why build these from scratch (à la New Urbanism) if they already exist and just need some care and polish?

Unfortunately, many other planners and urban designers, politicians, and decision makers ignore or oppose historic preservation activities, often justifying their decisions with the old equation that new construction equals economic development and the unstated corollary that only new construction equals economic development.

Portland, seen in this 1890 photograph, was listed as America’s most livable city by Forbes Magazine in 2009.

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Historic lampposts add ambience to the Tom McCall Waterfront Park in Portland, Oregon.

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By doing so they discard a tool that can make a major difference. They miss the opportunities that older neighborhoods, commercial strips, and even abandoned industrial districts can play in revitalization and economic development using the existing fabric. Cities such as Denver, Louisville, Portland, and Providence have successfully used the preservation and adaptive reuse of historic resources as major parts of revitalization efforts.

That may strike some as a rather bold assertion so let’s look at two case studies—one from New York City, and one from Austin, Texas. They are very different places but both are livable cities.

Light rail is an integral part of Portland’s commuter system.

Photo Credit: TravelPortland

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Downtown Portland has seen substantial revitalization helped by the sensitive restoration of historic buildings.

Photo Credit: TravelPortland

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