The Idea of the Historic City

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CONTENTS

GUEST EDITOR: Michele Lamprakos

The papers featured in this issue of Change OverTime were selected from the ‘‘Conserving theCity’’ symposium organized by Randall Masonand Michele Lamprakos and held at theUniversity of Pennsylvania School of Design onApril 28, 2012.

2 Foreword: Whence Urban Conservation, ViaLewis MumfordR A N D A L L M A S O N

E S S A Y S

8 The Idea of the Historic CityM I C H E L E L A M P R A K O S

40 The Paradox of Urban Conservation inFrance, 1830–1930K E V I N D . M U R P H Y

58 The Closed Versus the Open Cityscape: RivalTraditions from Nineteenth-Century EuropeB R I A N L A D D

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58

92

114

168

76 Gustavo Giovannoni: A Theory and aPractice of Urban ConservationG U I D O Z U C C O N I

92 Changing Ideas of Urban Conservation inMid-Twentieth-Century EnglandP E T E R J . L A R K H A M

114 Conservation on the Edge: PeriurbanSettlement Heritage in ChinaD A N I E L B E N J A M I N A B R A M S O N

142 Conserving Urban Water Heritage inMulticentered RegionsJ A M E S L . W E S C O A T J R .

168 Case StudyHistoric Alexandria: The Next Fifty YearsB A I R D S M I T H

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THE IDEA OF THE HISTORIC CITY

MICHELE LAMPRAKOSUniversity of Maryland, College Park

Figure 1. The Haussmannization of Paris: demolitions to make way for the Rue de l’Ecole on the Left Bank,por trayed in a wood engraving of 1858. (Bibliotheque nationale de France; reprinted in Kostof, The City Shaped)

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From its initial concern with monuments, conservation—called historic preservation in the United States—hasexpanded its focus to include the setting of the monument, historic quarters, and districts, and more recently,cultural and historic landscapes. On the positive side, conservation has tempered the onslaught of capitalistdevelopment: many historic areas have been saved from demolition. But in the process, much of the everydaycity has become a ‘‘monument’’—insulated from change and evolution. From its inception, the idea of the historiccity was constructed in opposition to the modern city, its ideological ‘‘other.’’ These twin constructs have madeit impossible to marry the concerns of development, stewardship, and sustainability. This essay argues that inorder to move forward, we must understand the origins of the idea of the historic city—questioning, revising, andperhaps discarding the assumptions on which it is based. It proposes a working narrative of the idea of thehistoric city, drawing on the experience of Western Europe, French North Africa, and the United States.

In its early years, conservation (called historic preservation in the United States) focused

on the protection of ‘‘monuments’’: that is, individual buildings deemed to be of excep-

tional historical and artistic value. As the canon of art history expanded, so did the inter-

ests of conservation: both came to embrace a wide variety of periods and styles,

and—most critically for our purposes—what the Italians called ‘‘minor architecture’’ (archi-

tettura minore).1 The old art historical criteria for evaluating monuments would be supple-

mented by what Alois Riegl called ‘‘age value’’ in his famous essay of 1903. ‘‘The category

of monuments of age-value,’’ wrote Riegl, ‘‘embraces every artifact without regard to its

original significance and purpose, as long as it reveals the passage of a considerable amount

of time.’’2

The idea that age value was the overarching value of the ‘‘modern cult of monuments’’

was both an astute observation and a prophecy. For Riegl described a shift in the under-

standing of the monument that had already occurred at the time of his writing: the grow-

ing perception that not only individual monuments, but the everyday fabric of the city,

was ‘‘historic’’ and worthy of conservation. Protection was gradually extended from the

individual monument, to the setting of the monument, to entire quarters and districts,

and recently, to cultural and historic landscapes.3 On the positive side, conservation tem-

pered the onslaught of capitalist development: many historic areas have been saved from

demolition. But in the process, much of the everyday landscape of the city has become a

‘‘monument.’’

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This happened as the field of conservation itself underwent a change. In the mid-

twentieth century, it was a critical, countercultural movement, fighting to protect build-

ings and neighborhoods from urban renewal. It is now a mainstream, highly bureaucra-

tized field, often in alliance with powerful development interests. In the postindustrial

West, many historic areas have been gentrified; in less-developed countries, where elites

continue to prefer modern districts, old urban cores remain the province of the poor. The

city-as-monument is being challenged in academia, in the press, on the streets of historic

districts, and increasingly, in the courts. Within the conservation field, many acknowledge

that standards designed for monuments cannot be applied to a living social-cultural fabric,

which has to change and evolve. Yet there is resistance to modifying guidelines for historic

districts: some fear that this will open the door to unrestricted development and the loss

of historical value.4 And indeed, where no regulations apply, we often see indiscriminate

demolition of existing fabric. We seem to have lost the ability to creatively engage with

the past: we either demolish historic areas, or we freeze them in time.

From its inception, the idea of the historic city was constructed in opposition to the

modern city, its ideological ‘‘other.’’ Where do these attitudes toward the past come from?

How did they come to form the dominant discourse in architecture, planning, and conser-

vation? What were the paths not taken—and should we revisit them? These questions

seem especially urgent now, given the current interest in sustainability. If the built envi-

ronment is a network of interrelated systems, then we have to treat the old and the new

as part of a single continuum.5

In order to answer the questions posed above, we need a history—a critical his-

tory—of the idea of the historic city. Despite recent interest in the topic, there has been

to date no sustained, historical-critical assessment of the concept.6 This can be explained,

in part, by its complex origins. In the nineteenth century and for much of the twentieth,

conservation was not a distinct profession: it was part of architectural practice, and the

new discipline of urban planning. It was also related to other fields, including art history,

urban and landscape history, the social sciences, and the various branches of conservation

studies. Specialists from these disciplines worked together and competed against one

another, to define and claim authority over the ‘‘historic.’’ If the historical and disciplinary

roots of the ‘‘historic city’’ are complex, its geographical breadth is perhaps even more

daunting. The idea evolved not only in Europe and the United States, but in Europe’s

colonies and, by the mid-twentieth century, across the globe. Much of the literature on

historic cities is local and national: it has not been translated or disseminated. Writing

this kind of history is also fraught with historiographical and ideological barriers. Most

histories of conservation present a standard narrative that naturalizes the application of

conservation standards to ever larger artifacts—art object, monument, neighborhood—

regardless of their nature, scale, and complexity. This narrative is mirrored in architectural

and planning histories, which tend to focus on new interventions, and to discount the role

of conservation and reuse.

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A critical history of conservation would include:

• A history of ideas, that developed alongside, and was informed by, architecture, art

history/historiography, archaeology, landscape and urban studies, and the social

sciences;

• A history of practice, that developed in the hands of architects, conservators, crafts-

men, and administrators; and

• A history of institutions—professional, educational, cultural, legal, and economic.

The narrative that emerges at the intersection of these threads—a story of people, ideas,

movements, policies—would help us better understand contemporary theory and practice.

The symposium ‘‘Conserving the City: Critical History and Urban Conservation,’’ held at

the University of Pennsylvania School of Design in April 2012, was intended as a step in

this direction.

In this introductory essay, I outline a working narrative of the idea of the historic

city—weaving together well-known threads and lesser known developments that are rarely

presented as part of the same story. Like all such narratives, this essay focuses on general

trends, drawing primarily on the experience of Western Europe, French North Africa, and

the United States. It is intended as a blueprint to be elaborated and modified by other

researchers.

Beginnings

The history of the modern approach to monuments has been charted, at least in its broad

outlines, over the course of the last twenty years.7 It emerged in the last decades of the

eighteenth century and the early decades of the nineteenth century, in the context of

revolution, Romanticism, and rising nationalist sentiments. Great works of art and build-

ings that had belonged to the old authorities—church, crown, nobility—were inherited by

liberal states. No longer supported by traditional systems of patronage and tithes, they

were threatened by neglect, sale, demolition, and vandalism.8 These works were reframed

in terms of new artistic and historical values: they came to be seen as patrimony (patri-

moine), the inheritance of the nation-state.9

The curatorial management of this patrimony developed alongside, and intersected

with, the disciplines of art history and archaeology. The documentary methods of these

disciplines were indebted to the Enlightenment practice of classification, and observing

and describing objects independent of context.10 Underlying these methods were assump-

tions about art and authorship inherited from the Renaissance: the notion that the work

of art is a discrete object by a known author, one that has been completed at a given point

in time. The idea of the creative individual or author developed alongside the notion of

the authentic object that she/he produced; both were closely tied to the modern notion of

the individual. At the same time, excellence in the arts was judged according to a universal

conception of aesthetics and norms. These ideas were reinforced by positivist thought.

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The idea of ‘‘significance,’’ still central to conservation discourse, derives from the positiv-

ist notion that meaning is inherent in the object.11 Meaning is determined by the creator,

and thus depends on the original form of the object.12 Accordingly, meaning and signifi-

cance must be objectively valid, and constant over time. These assumptions came under

scrutiny during the Romantic era as a developmental view of history was embraced and

universal values called into question. In the twentieth century, they were discredited by

contemporary cultural theory. But the same assumptions persist in conservation theory

and practice—despite the new emphasis on ‘‘values.’’

In the nineteenth century, the new developmental view of history, known as histori-

cism, gave rise to two different approaches to the monument. The first approach, some-

times called ‘‘stylistic restoration,’’ was concerned with historical forms: restorers sought to

return buildings to their original and ‘‘correct’’ historical styles. This approach was born

of, and dependent on, archaeological investigations of buildings and the catalogue of styles

that resulted. The second approach to the monument was informed by historicism as a

theory of history: the idea that sociocultural forms are historically determined, and that

truths are therefore relative.13 It follows that the forms produced in a particular era are

the unique expression of that era. Accordingly, critics like John Ruskin charged that resto-

ration ‘‘falsifies’’ the past:

[Restoration] is the most total destruction which a building can suffer . . . Another

spirit may be given by another time, but it is then a new building . . . [I]t is impossible,

as impossible to raise the dead, to restore anything that has ever been great or

beautiful in architecture . . .

Do not let us talk then of restoration. The thing is a Lie from beginning to end.

. . . We have no right whatever to touch [the buildings of the past]. They are not

ours. They belong partly to those who built them, and partly to the generations of

mankind who are to follow us.14

The belief that a building is the unique expression of its time was, of course, the

same notion of zeitgeist that would inspire the search for a modern architecture. And

indeed, restoration, conservation, and architecture have been closely intertwined. In the

nineteenth century, in Europe and its colonies, many architects restored in historical

styles, and also built architecture in those same styles; historical documentation provided

the basis for both. Later in the century, architects abandoned ‘‘pure,’’ archaeologically cor-

rect styles in favor of eclecticism—the artful juxtaposition of forms from various styles

and periods. Again, this is reflected in conservation practice. Earlier in the century, it had

been common practice to restore a building to its original form, stripping away later accre-

tions and rebuilding according to ‘‘correct’’ period style. Around the turn of the twentieth

century a kind of ‘‘consensus’’ developed against stylistic restoration: historic buildings

should be treated as documents of the past, their original form and materials carefully

conserved.15 This meant that all historical layers should be conserved and juxtaposed.

The interest in mixing and juxtaposing styles is related to a sensibility that came to

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be called ‘‘picturesque.’’ Usually associated with painting and landscape design, the pictur-

esque was hugely influential in architecture—not only in the proliferation and combina-

tion of styles, but in the thinking of key figures in the pantheon of modernism like Viollet-

le-Duc.16 In formal terms, the picturesque embraced variety in aesthetics, unexpected con-

trasts, and exotic motifs; as such, it was closely related to the multiplicity of forms that

were being discovered through historical studies and colonial conquest, which challenged

the universality of classical aesthetics. The picturesque was also a reaction against the

transformation of the countryside during the agricultural and industrial revolutions.17 Of

particular interest were subjects that evoked the passage of time. English landscape paint-

ers depicted abandoned landscapes, dilapidated houses, and struggling peasants. Left

behind by modernity, these subjects were portrayed as timeless and pure; but their suffer-

ing was anesthetized by painterly techniques that inserted spatial and temporal distance

between observer and subject.18 From the mid-nineteenth century, photographers were

attracted to similar qualities in the poor and working-class areas of London and Paris:

in contrast to modernized parts of town, they seemed to belong to a bygone era. The

same impulse led French colonial officials to cease their incursions into native cities

around the middle of the century, and to protect them.19 By the 1870s the picturesque

had penetrated the discourse of a new conservation movement: a reflection of growing

anxiety at the fragmentation of urban society, and the loss of a connection with the

past.20

From Historic Monument to Historic City

The nostalgia for old towns was one response to the destruction that accompanied the

modernization of the city. Rendered obsolete by new technologies and lifestyles, old urban

cores were abandoned, demolished, and ultimately reconfigured by new elites in the second

half of the nineteenth century. In the process, the city came to be seen as an object of

discourse and a field of intervention. This occurred in new scholarly and professional

fields, especially urban historiography and social sciences that focused on urban problems.

It also occurred in the practice of municipal officials, architects, and engineers who devel-

oped strategies to deal with the chaos of the industrial city.21 Their efforts facilitated and

mediated the emergence of a capitalist market, especially in cities like Paris and London

that were centers of empire.

By the mid-nineteenth century the old method of accommodating growth—through

city extensions, designed in the neoclassical manner—was no longer adequate. The new

economy required new modes and scales of transport and infrastructure; new and larger

building types for industry, commerce, and government; and housing for rural migrants

who were arriving in growing numbers. With sky-rocketing urban populations, public

health became an over-arching concern, especially after the cholera outbreak of 1832.22 A

turning point came in the 1840s, when the railroad caused significant breaches in the city

fabric (Fig. 2). Around this time, the idea of the ‘‘regulating plan’’ emerged in France, Italy,

and Germany, designed to achieve functional, economic, and political goals. In the words


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Figure 2. The construction of railways reordered urban space, as shown in this 1957 view of St. Pancrasand King’s Cross stations in London (completed 1868 and 1852, respectively). (National Railway Museum,London; Science & Society Picture Library)

of Baron Haussmann, planner for Napoleon III, the aim was to transform the ‘‘huge con-

sumer market, the immense workshop’’ of the city into a unified whole.23

Haussmann’s grands trauvaux, carried out between 1850 and 1870, were the largest

scale undertaking of their kind, the result of an alliance between a new bourgeoisie and a

long-established state corps of engineers.24 The wide boulevards or percees were designed

to open the city up to light and air, to facilitate the movement of vehicles and goods,

and to provide trenches for infrastructure below. Haussmann used the term eventrement,

‘‘disemboweling,’’ for his interventions, suggesting the treatment of a pathological disorder

(Fig. 1). And indeed ‘‘hygiene’’—as both science and metaphor—would inform the design

of the nineteenth-century city.25 Old neighborhoods thought to be incubators of disease

and revolution were cleared, and the working poor were relocated to the periphery. While

Haussmann’s city was superior in terms of public health and transport for those who

remained, it was also more segregated by class and function.26 The restructuring of the

city center displaced vast numbers of people, as evidenced by the shantytowns that arose

around the periphery. The center of Paris became a kind of urban theater in the self-

image of the haute bourgeoisie: celebrating new forms of leisure, consumption, and the

institutions of the liberal state.27

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Figure 3. Gustave Dore depicts the transformation of Paris (1860): Haussmann consults a map, above;medieval structures are car ted away as workers look on, cheering. (Bibliotheque nationale de France;reprinted in D. Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity)

Haussmann’s work was widely imitated throughout Europe and beyond, a model of

functional planning driven by concern for hygiene, traffic, and zoning. But the model was

aesthetic as well as functional. Principles of Baroque and Neoclassical planning, which had

for centuries been applied largely in unbuilt areas, were imposed on a dense and ancient

fabric at a scale that had not been seen before. This new urban aesthetic would be decried

by Camillo Sitte and others later in the century.28 Haussmann’s critics, too—and there

were many—saw the wide boulevards as monotonous. But they protested only when nota-

ble monuments were threatened (Fig. 3). The ancient fabric might be a source of nostalgia,

but it was not yet seen as ‘‘historic’’; indeed, the demolition of neighborhoods often pro-

ceeded hand in hand with the restoration of monuments.29 Old quarters were seen as

incompatible with modernization. In the preface to a book on the demolition of ‘‘old

Paris,’’ the eminent Romantic Theophile Gautier wrote:


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Figure 4. A postcard of the Andreasplatz, Hildesheim, Germany. Local building regulations passed around1900 required all new work visible from the street to be executed in forms and materials that had been inuse up to the mid-seventeenth century. (Hildesia-Verlag E.B.H. postcard, collection of the author; captionbased on Kostof, ‘‘His Majesty the Pick’’)

Modern Paris would be impossible in the Paris of old . . . Civilization is cutting broad

avenues into the old city’s dark maze of alleys, intersections and cul-de-sacs; it

levels houses like the American pioneer levels trees . . . Rotten walls are collapsing,

allowing dwellings worthy of man to rise out of their rubble, dwellings to which

health streams in with the air and peaceful contemplation with the light of the sun.30

In fact, Haussmann’s planning respected contemporary notions of the monument: that is,

it should be isolated and enhanced, as a marker and shaper of a vista. He challenged his

opponents to

name a single ancient monument worthy of interest, a single building precious for

the arts or intriguing by virtue of its memories, that has been damaged by my

administration . . . if it has not been for the purpose of isolating it and placing it at

the greatest possible advantage, in the most beautiful possible perspective.31

The practice of isolating monuments, called ‘‘disencumbering,’’ was based on the clas-

sical notion that a monument should be viewed as a midspace object. Historically, many

important buildings had been embedded in the urban fabric. Disencumbering assumed an

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Figure 5. A postcard depicting Rue Tombouctou in the old town of Algiers, circulated c. 1905. (Author’scollection)

ideal point from which the monument should be viewed—and this provided a rationale

for clearing fabric that stood between the viewer and the monument.32 Throughout the

nineteenth century, disencumbering went hand in hand with the conservation of monu-

ments; the monument was, by definition, a free-standing building. The practice fell out of

favor around the turn of the century in German-speaking countries and in Italy, alongside

a growing interest in the wider urban fabric. But it reemerged at various moments in the

twentieth century; for example, in LeCorbusier’s urban proposals for Paris, in Mussolini’s

works in Rome, and in the era of urban renewal.33

The Historic City and Cultural Identity

Throughout the nineteenth century and beyond, industrialization and growing urban pop-

ulations led to Haussmannesque strategies for old towns and cities. Boulevards were sliced


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through old fabric, neighborhoods were reshaped or demolished, and city walls were torn

down to allow for expansion and to ease the flow of traffic.34 City gates were sometimes

detached and left as free-standing monuments, with traffic directed around them.35 In

some places—including Paris itself—the documentation of areas slated for demolition

promoted the idea of an ‘‘historic city’’ distinct from the modern.36 In Italy, for example, a

national law passed soon after unification drew a distinction between the historic core of

cities and outlying areas.37

In the third quarter of the nineteenth century, a reaction emerged against what was

seen as soul-less, mechanical modern planning—and a new appreciation for the spatial

and aesthetic qualities of old towns.38 This reaction, which appeared first in England and

the German-speaking countries and migrated to Italy, took various forms.39 We see a new

interest in picturesque planning—identified especially with Camillo Sitte’s influential

book, City Planning According to Artistic Principles (1889), and with the garden city move-

ments in England and elsewhere. There was an important, culturalist undertone to this

reaction: what was being lost was a sense of identity—national, but also regional and local.

This was closely tied to the notion of environmental determinism, which would exert such

influence in planning circles around the turn of the century: the idea that the physical

environment determines, and reflects, the character of a people. The townscape came to

be seen as the bearer of cultural identity, and thus as a kind of ‘‘monument.’’40

In some places, medieval ‘‘revivals’’—which had informed both restoration and new

architecture—would be applied to whole neighborhoods. Historic buildings were restored

and new buildings designed to create a harmonious ensemble: one that represented a

particular period in the history of a city, selected to an ideological end.41 The historic

centers of places like Bologna and Hildesheim were reshaped in the nineteenth century

through building regulations, restoration, and artistic flights of fancy (Fig. 4).42 The prac-

tice of stylistic restoration, then, was transferred from the individual building to the urban

ensemble—creating, as Viollet-le-Duc said, ‘‘a condition of completeness that could never

have existed at any given time.’’43

The link between townscape and culture may have emerged earlier, in Europe’s colo-

nies.44 It was in the colonies, after all, that the idea of ‘‘culture’’ evolved, in the discipline

that would come to be called anthropology. Environmental determinism informed colonial

policy, especially in the well-documented case of French North Africa.45 In 1865 Napoleon

III—the very emperor who was sponsoring Haussmann’s work in Paris—called a halt to

eventrements in Algiers, which he saw as harmful to the native population.46 Thereafter

Europeans would live in new districts outside the old town (medina), and the latter would

be left alone. The picturesque character of the old towns was protected as a way to safe-

guard native culture, and also to attract tourists—who found the modern districts unap-

pealing.47 Conservation policies were implemented, and new architecture and districts

were built in neo-Moorish styles.48 The strict separation of new and old towns was legis-

lated in 1914 in Morocco, the first comprehensive urban planning legislation in the French

world.49 In the same year, the protectorate declared the walled city of Fez an historic

monument.50

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The ‘‘dual city’’ has been rightly portrayed as a diagram of colonial power relations,

but it was more than this. For the ‘‘dual city’’ appears outside the colonial context—indeed,

in virtually every city where an old town has been conserved.51 The reasons have to do

with economic and political expediency, and with the growth of a new conservation ethic.

Building modern extensions outside the old city was often more practical than the Hauss-

mann model, and was less politically sensitive if issues of land tenure could be overcome.52

In Europe, as in the colonies, the ‘‘historic city’’ came to be perceived in terms of its

otherness. The difference, here too, was both physical and social—since European cities

also had their ‘‘others,’’ rural migrants and working poor. But in contrast to historic cities

in Europe, old towns in the colonies were rarely provided with modern amenities like

water and sewer—which some colonial officials thought would compromise their charm.53

Once the center of civic life and patronage, the medinas became ghettos: their poverty and

backwardness were represented to colonial audiences as picturesque, evidence of some

parallel world where time had stopped (Fig. 5). The notion of the ‘‘traditional city’’—a

cornerstone of French colonial policy and urban historiography—would, ironically, later

be adopted wholesale into World Heritage discourse.

At the turn of the century, then, conservation was only one aspect of a more general

approach to the historic core in Europe and its colonies. The notion of contextualism

(ambientismo) was taken up around the turn of the century by a group called the Associazi-

one Artistica fra I Cultori di Architettura, which mobilized against proposed widenings and

demolitions within the old core of Rome. The Associazione Artistica was the antecedent of

various movements in Italian design and conservation.54 Gustavo Giovannoni, Marcello

Piacentini, Filippo Galassi and other members and affiliates of the group developed an

approach to historic centers that would be highly influential in the postwar period.55

Giovanonni (discussed by Zucconi in this volume) theorized contextual planning in

his 1913 book Vecchie Citta ed Edelizia Nuova (New Building in Old Cities). He argued that

the modern city and the historic city are based on radically different principles. Rather

than building the modern city on top of the old—as practiced by Haussmann, and general-

ized in Germany and Austria by Joseph Stubbens—the modern city should be displaced:

it should develop outside the historic core, according to its own logic.56 The old core would

accommodate certain functions appropriate to its fabric and scale. But it should be surgi-

cally modified, to allow for the exigencies of modern life—an approach that Giovannoni

called diradamento, ‘‘thinning out,’’ a term borrowed from forestry practice. This would

not only allow light and air into the dense fabric, but would also open up new points of

view.57

Camillo Sitte had opposed the disencumbering and isolation of monuments, and the

Italian contextualists agreed with him. But diradamento involved selective demolition—as

well as the creation of new architecture, to shape vistas and enclose urban space. The

approach bore an interesting relationship to nineteenth-century restoration practice—

aiming, as it did, at a degree of stylistic unity at the urban scale. But the technique is also

indebted to the anti-restoration school. New construction and additions should not imi-

tate historic fabric: rather, these should be executed in a neutral idiom that resembles the


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original in volume and massing—creating, in essence, ‘‘a modern vernacular.’’58 This

notion of neutral infill—what Piacentini called ‘‘architectural prose’’ (prosa architetton-

ica)—would influence a later generation of modernists, and become a central principle of

building in historic centers. Here again, there is a fascinating overlap between disciplines.

Much as the lacuna in a painting should be filled in by neutral material, so as not to detract

from surviving authentic fragments, so ‘‘background building’’ would stitch together the

authentic fragments of a city—providing a sense of artistic wholeness without imitating

the original.59

The approach of the Associazione Artistica—a combination of conservation, conserva-

tive surgery,60 and new contextual architecture—represented what Giovannoni called ‘‘the

new tendency’’ (la nuova tendenza) of picturesque planning:

To introduce a sense of the picturesque in new cities, whether by taking advantage

of natural and monumental views, or by studying the lines of circulation and open

spaces, not as geometric lines and figures, but as varied and lively groupings; to limit

the adoption of straight streets to only necessary cases; . . . to return the main

squares to that closed character, which was typical of our ancient ones; and above

all to preserve, in both general and specific terms, the unique character of the city

or quarter.61

Contextualists in Italy, Germany, and elsewhere were interested in cultural continuity—

which was as much about shaping a city of the future, as about conserving the past.62 But

they also saw the monument, and the city, in a new way. Disencumbering was based on

the rules of perspective: it assumed a stationery viewer, located at an ideal distance from

the monument which was, by definition, a discrete, midspace object (Fig. 6). The contextu-

alists, in contrast, believed that the monument was best appreciated in relation to its

‘‘prose.’’ They too used perspective, but to a different end: to design the ambiente, the

urban landscape, in three dimensions.63 They were interested in Sittesque variety and

surprise—and thus in multiple and shifting viewpoints. To what extent was this new

aesthetic related to contemporary developments in art, and in the new medium of photo-

graphy? Might it also be related, as Ladd suggests in this volume, to new modes of

transportation that allowed passengers to experience the city as successive vignettes or

frames?

Two Professions

Contextual planning was a fluid process, which, as Alfonso Rubbiani noted, could not be

done on a map: it must be carried out through careful, on-site evaluation ‘‘corner by

corner, house by house, intersection by intersection.’’64 But some sought more definitive

solutions for the old core. In many places cultural elites—historians, artists, and antiquari-

ans—developed a quasi-scientific discourse for the historic city that would compete with

that of the ‘‘wideners’’ (as the followers of Haussmann were sometimes called). At the

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Figure 6. Piero della Francesca, Ideal City, c. 1470, Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, Urbino.

same time, they sought to protect historic districts through legal instruments and institu-

tions that had been developed for art objects and monuments.65 In some places, like

Charleston, these legal measures were integrated with zoning—which was itself a new

concept in the early twentieth century. As such, historic value was framed in ‘‘objective’’

terms, alongside light, air, and public health and safety concerns. A number of American

cities followed Charleston’s lead including Alexandria, discussed by Smith in this volume.66

Historic character—defined by lots sizes, building heights, bay widths, facade layouts,

details, and materials—would be preserved by special provisions within the zoning ordi-

nance. These criteria would protect existing architecture, but would also regulate the

design of new architecture for decades to come.

In most places, however, area-based conservation—where it existed at all—remained

weak. Pressures on old urban cores increased during the interwar period, with the rise of

car ownership. Modernists saw the car and the limitless mobility it provided as the way of

the future: as Le Corbusier famously quipped, ‘‘a city made for speed is a city made for

success.’’67 The car seemed to consecrate Giovannoni’s notion that the modern city and

the historic city are based on two different, and incompatible, logics. But while Giovannoni

wanted to displace modern development to save the historic city, some modernists wanted

to eradicate it. Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin (1925) would have demolished the historic core

of Paris, leaving only select monuments standing as ‘‘poetic objects’’ (objets a reaction poe-

tiques) within the vast spaces of the new city (Fig. 7).68

Once again, the links between architecture and conservation are striking. In the nine-

teenth century, as we have seen, new architecture and restoration informed each other:

both created new fabric in historical styles. Toward the end of the century, these parallel

discourses and practices began to diverge. Some architects called for a modern architecture

in the spirit of the time. And creation of historic fabric—in both new architecture and

restoration—came to be seen as ‘‘faking’’ the past. Riegl consecrated these ideas in his

distinction between ‘‘age value’’ and ‘‘newness value.’’69 As Alan Colquhoun observed:

the two ideas are antithetical and must be kept rigidly separate, [but] they are also

complementary and dependent on each other. This idea corresponds closely to the

ideas of the modern movement, in which the preservation of historical monuments


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PAGE 22

Figure 7. Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin for Paris (1925) would have demolished most of the old city, leavingonly select monuments. (� F.L.C./ADAGP, Paris/Ar tists Rights Society [ARS], New York 2014)

sometimes went hand in hand with the destruction and rebuilding of the city. . . .

Historical works have here lost their meaning as part of the fabric of time and space

and are preserved as emblems of a generalized and superseded past.70

In the interwar period, and especially after World War II, conservation would emerge as a

distinct profession—taught in specialized institutes, and with its own career track in local

and state bureaucracies. This parallels the professionalization of architecture, which would

come to be defined by high modernist ideology. The two professions, in effect, came to

define themselves as respective specialists of the old and the new.

This dualism was clearly described in two ‘‘Athens Charters,’’ written within two years

of one another. The Athens Charter of 1931 was the first international charter to promote

conservation theory and methodology.71 It noted and endorsed the general tendency in

Europe to abandon restoration in favor of a more conservative and ‘‘scientific’’ approach

to the treatment of monuments. The historic character of monuments should be pre-

served, and all historical periods of the monument respected. The surroundings of a monu-

ment should be given special consideration; ‘‘[e]ven certain groupings and certain

particularly picturesque perspective treatment (sic) should be preserved.’’ In 1933 another

and more famous ‘‘Athens Charter,’’ drafted by CIAM (Centre Internationale de l’Architecture

Moderne), outlined functionalist principles for city planning. While certain exceptional

monuments might be accommodated (e.g., by diverting traffic around them), the authors

refused any compromise with existing fabric. At the same time, new architecture must

avoid any reference to the old.72

In reality, however, there was a gap between ideology and practice. Contrary to the

narrative of professional texts, neither modernism nor strict conservation gained general

acceptance. Approaches to both varied from place to place, and in response to specific

conditions. Postwar rebuilding is a case in point. As the first war of aerial bombardment,

World War II resulted in unprecedented destruction. Some towns were rebuilt in their

historical forms, making the theory of conservation essentially irrelevant.73 Some modern-

ists saw the destruction as an opportunity: there was now a clean slate on which to build

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Figure 8. Independence Mall construction (between Chestnut and Market Streets), Tom Kehoe,photographer, September 1953. Clearance of the area in front of Independence Hall, Philadelphia, tocreate Independence National Park. (Cour tesy, Independence National Historical Park)

the heroic city of the future. Instead, much rebuilding was executed in regional or tradi-

tional styles. This practice was in part dictated by expediency: it was politically easier, and

less expensive, to rebuild along existing street and utility lines. But it was also because

many administrators did not like modernism. In Germany and elsewhere, rebuilding in

regional, historicizing styles was seen as a way to restore the national spirit.74

It was only in the era of urban renewal that modernist ideals were realized on some-

thing of a grand scale. CIAM-style planning, ascendant in schools of architecture, shaped

a new generation of architects, planners, and urban administrators. Public projects for

transportation and infrastructure combined with private development to reshape the old

cores of cities. The American case is well-known, epitomized in the work of Robert Moses:

he proposed several Haussmann-style eventrements through Manhattan, but only one, the

Cross Bronx Expressway, was realized—at tremendous economic and social cost.75 The

defeat of Moses’s later projects by neighborhood coalitions, sometimes in alliance with the

nascent preservation movement, has become legendary.76 While conservation is usually

portrayed as a reaction to, and the nemesis of, urban renewal, the two sometimes went

hand in hand. In some places the continuing focus on monuments led to a reprise of

disencumbering—for example, when the neighborhood around Independence Hall in Phil-

adelphia was demolished to create Independence National Historical Park (Fig. 8).


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PAGE 24

In contrast to the United States, old urban cores in Europe were not abandoned by

working and middle classes. They remained the vital core of cities, largely because public

investment continued in transport and other infrastructure, and policies were enacted to

contain sprawl.77 Development was slow until the mid-1950s, which relieved pressure on

the old cores. But with economic recovery, development boomed: speculators bought up

property in city centers, and by the end of the decade, American-style public-private part-

nerships had emerged, characterized by top-down planning.78 Heavy-handed interven-

tions, often involving transportation projects, led to waves of public protest and

ultimately, to the adoption of participatory planning models. Resident groups and the

professionals who supported them called for a different model of urban renewal: one that

focused on the incremental rehabilitation of existing neighborhoods, rather than clearance

and displacement.79 Yet it was clear early on that these efforts would lead to gentrification,

even where laws protected the rights of existing residents.80

Contested in Europe and the United States, functionalist planning would leave per-

haps an even greater mark on the old cities of the Middle East and North Africa.81 Monu-

ments conservation had been established in the nineteenth century in countries that were

under direct or indirect colonial rule; after decolonization, newly independent states

retained the old colonial offices and practices. They prized ancient and Islamic antiquities

as signs of civilization and membership in the world community. But old cities were differ-

ent. The European-style districts were, after all, the center of government, commerce, and

modern life. Old cores, in contrast, were inhabited by rural migrants and other ‘‘tradi-

tional’’ people: for modernizing elites, they represented a backward past that should

be ignored or erased. European architects were invited to develop plans for these areas:

examples are Andre Guitton’s plan for Aleppo (1954), Ludovico Quaroni’s plan for Tunis

(1964), and Michel Ecochard’s plan for Damascus (1986). Many of these plans initiated,

or extended, demolitions in the old cores.82 In Tunis a grassroots movement emerged to

protest the destruction of the medina—a movement that was similar in spirit to contempo-

rary protest movements in Europe and the United States.83 But Tunis was the exception.

An Egyptian architect, who served as UNESCO’s Desk Officer for Arab states in the 1970s,

described the general sentiment in Cairo at the time:

The Department of Antiquities was staffed by Egyptologists . . . They saw the old

city as old buildings and poor people and dirt. Why conserve it? . . . Some of them

had never set foot in the old city.84

In the 1960s and 1970s the UNDP, working with UNESCO, rehabilitated historic cores in

the region under the rubric of conservation-based development. Interest grew in the 1970s

with the World Heritage initiative and especially the conservation of Fez, which became a

model in the region. Elites started to be persuaded of the usefulness of urban heritage for

nationalism, and perhaps especially, as a draw for tourists.85

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Planning for the ‘‘Historic Center’’

The 1960s and 1970s saw a growing interest in planning for the ‘‘historic center.’’ Among

the many experiments at the time the Italian model was unique: it would be highly influ-

ential in Europe and beyond. Destruction in old towns had been extensive during the war;

real estate values were low, and housing and infrastructure had to be rebuilt or upgraded.

Italy’s ‘‘economic miracle’’ (1957–63) spurred major migrations within the country, from

south to north and from countryside to city; population pressures increased in large indus-

trial cities, as smaller settlements were abandoned. Speculation was rampant in historic

centers, resulting in demolitions and uncontrolled new building—provoking a reaction

among Italian professionals and the wider public.86 A number of well-known architects

developed plans for historic centers that balanced modernization and conservation.87 Bolo-

gna is perhaps the best-known case, where public funds were used to upgrade the historic

center in an effort to avoid displacement. Housing was restored and upgraded, and new

infill was designed after local typologies—the kind of fabric that Piacentini had called

‘‘background building’’ (Fig. 9).88 Despite the influence of the Bologna model, conservation

of the historic center was limited by opposition from real estate interests.89

Italian municipalities developed detailed plans (piani particolareggiati) for historic

areas, often based on rigorous historical study and typological analysis. Planning for his-

toric centers was not a distinct field: throughout the 1960s and 1970s, it was at the center

of professional training for architects and planners. The relationship of the historic center

and its hinterland was also considered—anticipating the current interest in cultural and

historic landscapes.90 But this kind of integration remained rare. In the postwar era, urban

plans for cities and towns were generally based on functionalist zoning—which contra-

dicted virtually every aspect of building morphology and land use in the old urban cores.

Although national legislation was sometimes passed to protect these areas, it was rarely

integrated with planning at the local level. In France, for example, the Loi Malraux of

1962 provided for the creation of protected sectors (secteurs sauvgardes), but professionals

lamented that they were not integrated with wider urban strategies.91

The failure of functionalist planning was part of the wider critique of the welfare

state in the 1960s. Opposition to urban renewal, and a general pessimism toward new

architecture and the role of the architect, strengthened the hand of conservation.92 A

critique developed within the architectural profession: there was growing interest in the

social aspects of design, and in a variety of vernacular, regional, and cultural expressions.

Architects and educators spoke of ‘‘identity’’ and ‘‘diversity’’ and how these could be sus-

tained through the built environment. They looked to traditional models—and the original

exemplars were the historic cities themselves.93 These were now seen as special areas, to

be protected as part of a collectively owned ‘‘heritage’’—another term that was new at the

time.94 In the following decades, these areas would be restored and marketed to a new

brand of more affluent and ostensibly more discerning tourists who were interested in

history and culture. This was part of an effort to diversify tourism—for in the 1950s and


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PAGE 26

Figure 9. Restoration plans for a quar ter of Bologna. From G. M. Accame, ed., Conoscenza e coscienzadella citta, 1974; reprinted in D. Appleyard, The Conservation of European Cities, 1979. (Cour tesy of MITPress)

1960s, mass ‘‘sun-and-beach’’ tourism had ravaged coastlines and was showing diminishing

returns.95

The postwar, growth-based model was challenged on many fronts, a critique that was

solidified by the recession of the early 1970s. In the new ‘‘age of limits,’’ the slowing pace

of development gave a boost to conservation. Professionals and lobbyists forged an alli-

ance with the environmental movement, reframing their work within the discourse of

sustainability.96 By the 1980s historic buildings were portrayed as ‘‘cultural resources’’: like

natural resources, they were ‘‘non-renewable’’ but could also be exploited through respon-

sible ‘‘management.’’ The term resource, of course, also implied economic value. This point

is underlined by the term mise en valeur, which established conservation as part of the

wider ‘‘culture industry.’’97

In the United States, towns that had been decimated by the flight of capital and

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population and by the recession began to exploit the tourist potential of historic down-

towns.98 Federal and state tax credit programs provided much-needed incentives for build-

ing owners and developers to restore and rehabilitate existing structures, rather than

tearing them down. In the process, however, criteria for monuments conservation came

to be applied to wider historic districts. The U.S. Secretary of Interior Standards (SOI)—

originally intended for buildings that would receive federal tax credits—were adopted by

virtually every state and government, and integrated into local zoning and building codes.

In Alexandria’s Old Town, for example, the SOI Standards were applied to most projects,

and historic preservation came to guide virtually all planning decisions.99

As public support for conservation grew, so did specialized bureaucracies at the local,

regional, and national levels. New professional programs proliferated to fill the demand:

especially in the United States, conservation became a specialized field, requiring no prior

training in architecture, planning, or allied fields.100 Professional curricula have tended to

emphasize a curatorial approach to the built environment; in some places, students emerge

with excellent skills in material and building conservation. But in their professional

careers, they oversee a wide variety of interventions in historic areas, including infill and

adaptive reuse, which imply a different understanding of conservation.101 Meanwhile,

architectural schools continue to focus on design ex nihilo—even though an increasing

proportion of architects’ work involves adaptive reuse. Today, architecture and conserva-

tion remain on separate tracks: speaking different languages, teaching different skills, and

beholden to ideologies that often seem at cross purposes.

The Historic City in the Era of Neoliberalism

The sixteenth Annual US/ICOMOS Conference, held at the Savannah College of Art and

Design in May 2013, was provocatively entitled ‘‘The Historic Center and the Next City:

Envisioning Urban Heritage Evolution.’’ Presenters looked at urban conservation in the

United States and abroad, but few raised the questions that some of us were expecting:

What are the impacts of preservation regulations on neighborhoods and the wider city?

Are these impacts sustainable—and do they support preservationists’ wider concerns, like

environmental and social justice?102 What, in short, is the role of the historic city in the

city of the future? To answer this question, we have to once again look to the past.

As Choay observed, the ‘‘historic city’’ was conceived in contrast to the modern city.103

It was invented and reinforced through cycles of destruction, as the old core was chal-

lenged by modern technologies and lifestyles. These cycles involved both active destruc-

tion by modernization, and passive destruction by abandonment and neglect. What we

call the ‘‘historic city’’ was, for many centuries, the heart of vibrant urban societies, the

theater of civic and social life.104 But today the old core often seems a relic of a bygone

age, a variation on the historical theme park. Jane Jacobs’s argument—that aged buildings

have a crucial place in urban economies, providing middle and working class housing and

incubators for small businesses—seems the quaint musing of a dated, activist stance.105


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PAGE 28

Figure 10. Bombed during the Balkan Wars, the old town of Dubrovnik was reconstructed at tremendouscost with international assistance. Long a tourist destination, it has now been given over entirely toshopping and tourism. (Alex Proimos, CC BY 2.0)

In the postindustrial world, the historic center has been cleaned-up and over-

restored, a kind of stage set for high-end retail, tourism, and cultural events. The ‘‘Venice

syndrome’’ has become shorthand for the tragedy of conservation: a gorgeous shell emp-

tied of life. In historic cities across Europe and the United States, beneath the veneer of

diversity, we find a disturbing sameness—the same international franchises, the same

tourist-oriented restaurants, just as we find the now-ubiquitous cultural complex, designed

by the ‘‘starchitect.’’106 Rising property values in historic centers are tied, in part, to the

high costs of exacting restoration standards (Fig. 10). As residents and local businesses

cash out or are displaced, the social and cultural fabric is transformed—a process that was

foreseen decades ago.107 If the gentrified old town is typical of the postindustrial world,

the ghettoized old town still predominates in the Middle East and North Africa. Dwarfed

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by sprawling megacities, the historic core is usually low on politicians’ agendas. Their

interest may be sparked by international initiatives or the promise of tourist dollars—but

the latter, at least, is increasingly remote in an era of political upheaval. The problems of

historic areas are usually seen in isolation from broader urban concerns: but in fact, they

have much in common with the informal settlements that seem to be their opposite. Like

the latter, historic areas are inhabited by the poor; they may be deficient in infrastructure

and services, but land prices may nevertheless be exceedingly high.

The historic city, then, plays a particular role within the larger project of neoliberal

urbanism. If, as many critics have argued, architecture has become an object of consump-

tion, the commodified historic center is one aspect of this broader trend. Like the ideal

New Urbanist town, it is a place where we go to forget what our built environment is

really like—and what the costs of building really are, in human, economic, and environ-

mental terms.108

In recent years some have urged us to reignite the critical potential of architecture.

What role might the historic city play in this effort? We should be careful not to portray

the premodern city as an idyllic place of social justice and harmony (a view that is, in fact,

promoted by much heritage literature). Architecture has always been deeply embedded in

power relations. Yet it is also true that the preindustrial city was less segregated by class

and race; in this context, density and walkability were virtues, allowing families and work-

ers of different income levels access to the same places.109 While cities have long been

enmeshed in, and enriched by, global currents of thought and practice, they also drew on

local resources, materials, and knowledge to a much greater extent than they do today.

Industrial architecture—celebrated as ‘‘heritage’’ at the very moment that manufacturing

jobs have disappeared—attests to a time when capital had some degree of commitment to

a specific locale.110 Cultural elites and community groups insisted that old cities repre-

sented important, nonmonetary values—as human environments, architectural master-

works, and repositories of collective memory. As such they stood against a market-driven,

throwaway culture. But this stance was soon stripped of its critical edge. Conservation

bureaucracies, in alliance with development interests, created ‘‘museums’’ within the mod-

ern city, while surrounding development proceeded unchecked. The historic city is not

really testimony to an unchanging past. As we have seen, it has been actively coaxed into

being through regulation, destruction, exclusion, and invention.

As the ‘‘other’’ of the modern city, the historic city underwrites the myth of progress.

If sustainability has any meaning, it lies in demolishing this myth. Architects, conservation

professionals, and planners need to come together to craft a new vision of the city. We

must dismantle the professional and disciplinary structures that have bifurcated the city

into old and new, and amputated it from its region. There is only one city: a collective

work of art, the outcome of a single historical process that continues to unfold.111

Throughout history the city has been shaped by a creative synergy between old and new,

between change and continuity: indeed, it is this synergy that created the places we con-

sider ‘‘heritage.’’


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PAGE 30

References1. On heritage ‘‘inflation’’—chronological, geographical, typological—see F. Choay, The Invention of the

Historic Monument, trans. L. M. O’Connell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), chap. 6.2. ‘‘The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Its Origin,’’ trans. K. Foster and D. Ghirardo,

Oppositions 25 (Fall 1982): 24. Riegl’s essay is a formative document of conservation theory andpractice. For a critical assessment of the essay as it relates to conservation practice and policy, seemy forthcoming article: ‘‘Reigl’s ‘Modern Cult of Monuments’ and the Problem of Value’’ (pendingpublication).

3. G. Araoz describes shifting and expanding areas of conservation from the 1960s to the present,culminating in the recent formulation of ‘‘historic urban landscape’’ (‘‘World-Heritage Historic UrbanLandscapes: Defining and Protecting Authenticity,’’ APT Bulletin 39, nos. 2–3 [2008]: 33–37).

4. For the view of an eminent conservator on this question see P. Phillippot, ‘‘La restauration dans laperspective des sciences humaines,’’ in Penetrer l’art, Restaurer l’oeuvre, ed. C. Perier-D’Ieteren (1989),excerpted and reprinted in S. N. Price et. al., eds., Historical and Philosophical Issues in the Conservationof Cultural Heritage (Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute, 2000), 216–29.

5. This was noted by Mark Hewitt two decades ago in his essay ‘‘Architecture for a Contingent Environ-ment,’’ Journal of Architectural Education 47, no. 4 (May 1994). A similar argument was made byFrank Matero and Jeanne Marie Teutonico in 2001: ‘‘If sustainability ultimately means learning tothink and act in terms of interrelated systems, then heritage with its unique value and experiencemust be ultimately integrated with the new’’ (‘‘Managing Change: Sustainable Approaches to theConservation of the Built Environment,’’ 4th US/ICOMOS International Symposium, Philadelphia,April 6–8, 2001).

6. This essay was inspired in part by chapter 5 of Choay’s Invention, which lays out a framework for acritical history of urban conservation. Several years in the making, it has been enriched by conversa-tions with many people, especially Nasser Rabbat, Frank Matero, Michael Herzfeld, Heghnar Waten-paugh, Ronald Lewcock, Hasan Uddin Khan, Richard Etlin, Steven Philip Kramer, and the presentersat the PennDesign symposium. My approach is indebted to Spiro Kostof, with whom I had the greatfortune to study at Berkeley, and who inspired me to study cities.

Recent interest in the topic of urban conservation can be gauged by numerous initiatives,conferences, and publications by UNESCO, ICOMOS, the Getty Conservation Institute, and otherorganizations. See F. Bandarin and R. van Oers, eds., The Historic Urban Landscape: Managing Heritagein an Urban Century (Blackwell, 2012); Conservation Perspectives: GCI Newsletter, special issue onhistoric cities, fall 2011; J. Cody and F. Siravo, eds., Readings in Conservation: Historic Cities and UrbanConservation (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, forthcoming 2015).

7. See especially Choay, Invention; D. Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1985); M. Glendinning, The Conservation Movement: A History of Architectural Pres-ervation, Antiquity to Modernity (Hoboken: Taylor and Francis, 2013). M. Page and R. Mason’s GivingPreservation a History: Histories of Historic Preservation in the United States (New York and London:Routledge, 2004) is similar in spirit to the present volume. For a less critical, but helpful, documen-tary account see J. Jokilehto, A History of Architectural Conservation (Oxford: Butterworth-Heine-mann, 1999). For urban conservation see D. Appleyard, ed., The Conservation of European Cities(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1979); P. Larkham, Conservation and the City (London and New York:Routledge, 1996); S. Bianca, Urban Form in the Arab World: Past and Present (London: Thames andHudson, 2000): Part III; A. Tung, Preserving the World’s Great Cities: The Destruction and Renewal ofthe Historic Metropolis (New York: Clarkson Potter, 2001). See also S. Kostof, The City Shaped: UrbanPlanning and Meaning through History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1991), 82–89; and The CityAssembled: the Elements of Urban Form Through History (Boston: Bulfinch Press, 1992), 298–306.

8. This historical transition to the care of the state, the impact on the urban fabric, and the problemsit produced—many of which are still unresolved—is an understudied aspect of conservation history.On the Spanish case, see I. Ordieres Dıez, Historia de la restauracion monumental en Espana, 1835–1936 (Madrid: Ministerio de Cultura, Direccion General de Bellas Artes y de Conservacion y Restaura-cion de Bienes Culturales, Instituto de Conservacion y Restauracion de Bienes Culturales, 1995).

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9. See M. Herzfeld, ‘‘Mere Symbols,’’ Anthropologia 50 (2008): 141–55; and ‘‘The European Self: Rethink-ing an Attitude,’’ in The Idea of Europe: from Antiquity to the European Union, ed. A. Pagden (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). On patrimoine and the link to property, see R. Handler,‘‘Who Owns the Past? History, Cultural Property, and the Logic of Possessive Individualism,’’ in ThePolitics of Culture, ed. Williams (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 63–74.

10. Choay, Invention, 50–55.11. J. Tainter and G. J. Lucas, ‘‘Epistemology of the Significance Concept,’’ American Antiquity 48, no. 4

(October 1983): 707–19.12. In the case of both intentional and unintentional monuments, wrote Riegl, ‘‘we are interested in

their original, uncorrupted appearance as they emerged from the hands of their maker and to whichwe seek by whatever means to restore them’’ (‘‘The Modern Cult of Monuments,’’ 21–23).

13. A. Colquhoun, ‘‘Three Kinds of Historicism,’’ in Modernity and the Classical Tradition: ArchitecturalEssays 1980–1987 (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1989), 3. In essence, these two approachesto the monument reflect two different understandings, and uses, of the term ‘‘historicism’’ describedby Colquhoun. This discussion is indebted to his essay.

14. J. Ruskin, ‘‘The Lamp of Memory,’’ The Seven Lamps of Architecture, nos. 18–20 (1849). This was nota uniquely English position, as is often assumed, but came to be known as such.

15. W. Denslagen, for example, describes this consensus in German-speaking countries circa 1900 (Archi-tectural Restoration in Western Europe: Controversy and Continuity [Amsterdam: Architectura & NaturaPress, 1994], 144). The tendency was already evident in the last quarter of the nineteenth century,for example, in the Italian practice of ‘‘philological restoration’’ (Jokilehto, A History of ArchitecturalConservation, 200–203).

16. See especially R. Etlin, Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier: The Romantic Legacy (Manchester: Man-chester University Press, 1994), chap. 2. Histories of architecture usually cast Viollet-le-Duc as astructural rationalist and prophet of modernism, ignoring both his interest in the picturesque andhis pivotal role in the development of restoration practice. Histories of conservation, equally ideolog-ical, generally denounce Viollet-le-Duc’s stylistic recreations, and ignore his theoretical works onarchitecture. On the influence of the picturesque on nineteenth-century historicist architecture, seeC. Meeks, ‘‘Picturesque Eclecticism,’’ The Art Bulletin 32, no. 3 (September 1950): 226–35.

17. M. Andrews, ‘‘The Metropolitan Picturesque,’’ in The Politics of the Picturesque: Literature, Landscape,and Aesthetics Since 1770, ed. S. Copley and P. Garside (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1994), 283.

18. Ibid., 288–89. I am also indebted to Gigi Dillon’s unpublished paper, ‘‘The Uses and Disadvantagesof the Picturesque in French Morocco,’’ which she wrote for my graduate seminar at Duke Universityin the fall of 1998.

19. See S. Hamadeh, ‘‘The Traditional City: A French Project,’’ in Forms of Dominance: On the Architectureand Urbanism of the Colonial Enterprise, ed. N. Alsayyad (Aldershot: Avebury Press, 1992), 241–59;and M. Lamprakos, ‘‘Le Corbusier and Algiers: The Plan Obus as Colonial Urbanism,’’ in Forms ofDominance: On the Architecture and Urbanism of the Colonial Enterprise, ed. N. Alsayyad (Aldershot:Avebury Press, 1992), 183–210.

20. Andrews, ‘‘The Metropolitan Picturesque,’’ 288–97.21. Choay, Invention, 120; and The Modern City: Planning in the 19th Century (New York, George Braziller,

1969), 7–15. See also P. Rabinow, French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Cam-bridge and London: MIT Press, 1989); and G. Zucconi, La Citta Contesa: dagli ingegneri sanitari agliurbanistici (1855–1942) (Milano: Editoriale Jaca Book SpA), 1989.

22. Rabinow notes that this cholera outbreak was a turning point, linking concerns over urban form,social composition, and health (French Modern, 30–39).

23. Choay, The Modern City, 10–11, 16; Kostof, The City Assembled, 57–59, 156. On the capitalist restruc-turing of Paris, see especially D. Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity (Routledge: New York and Lon-don, 2003). On the precedents and heirs of Haussmann, see S. Kostof, ‘‘His Majesty the Pick: TheAesthetics of Demolition,’’ Design Quarterly, nos. 118–119 (1982): 34–41.

24. A. Picon, Architects and Engineers in the Age of Enlightenment, trans. T. Martin (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1992), chap. 1.


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25. Public health, along with transportation, shaped the discipline that would be called urban planning.See Zucconi, La Citta Contesa, 30–35; and Kostof, The City Assembled, 266. Kostof notes that theterm eventrement (Italian, sventramento) derives from Enlightenment discourse. In nineteenth-cen-tury France, disease is equated with social pathology (Rabinow, French Modern, 31–32).

26. J. Scott, Seeing Like a State (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998), 59–63. Haussmann’swork in Paris was an early example of ‘‘gentrification,’’ but as Harvey notes, middle classes weredisplaced too. See Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity, 246.

27. On the nineteenth-century city and bourgeois self-representation, see Harvey, Paris, esp. chap. 12;and C. E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1981), 24–115.

28. For both Zucconi and Ladd, approaches to the city were increasingly framed in terms of two alter-nate and competing aesthetics (G. Zucconi, La Citta Contesa, chap. 4; and B. Ladd, Urban Planningand Civic Order [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990], chap. 4). The arguments heard at thetime echoed familiar oppositional pairs that had been used to contrast premodern and modernarchitecture and towns earlier in the century: spontaneous and planned, organic and mechanical,rational and emotional. These gave rise to what Choay calls the ‘‘progressist’’ and ‘‘culturalist’’ modelsof city planning (F. Choay, The Modern City). For the ‘‘organic’’ metaphor in Italy, see R. Etlin, Modern-ism in Italian Architecture, 1890–1940 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 109–11.

29. The restoration of Notre Dame Cathedral provided a pretext for clearing surrounding land; see K.Murphy’s essay in this volume.

30. Edouard Fournier and Theophile Gautier, Paris Demoli, 1855, cited in F. Choay, Invention, 119. Gau-tier was a close friend of Victor Hugo and spokesman for the Romantic movement.

31. Cited in Choay, Invention, 117.32. See Ladd’s essay in this volume and Urban Planning and Civic Order in Germany, chap. 4. Disencum-

bering is degagement in French; Freilegung in German; liberazione or sgombero in Italian.33. Disencumbering survives in the requirement for a non aedificandi zone around monuments—a provi-

sion that still exists in some conservation laws and charters.34. Vienna, where city walls and glacis were demolished to create a grand boulevard lined with elite

residences, would become an influential model. Camillo Sitte’s book was written in response to theproject. See Schorske’s classic account in Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture, 24–115; and Collinsand Collins, Camillo Sitte.

35. See Larkham’s essay in this volume.36. Choay, Invention, 117.37. See G. Zucconi’s essay in this volume.38. Kostof, The City Shaped, 82.39. Choay, Invention, chap. 5; Etlin, Modernism in Italian Architecture, 102; and Zucconi, La Citta Contesa,

98–99. On the growing interest in historic areas in Germany see Ladd, Urban Planning and CivicOrder, 128–29; for Italy, see Etlin, Modernism in Italian Architecture, chap. 4. In France, interest inthe settings of monuments would eventually lead to protective measures; for an early indication ofthis trend, see Murphy’s essay in this volume on Vezelay. As early as 1854, Ruskin lamented thedemolitions in many European cities that jeopardized their medieval character; Rouen, he said, wasthe only remaining town where ‘‘the effect of old French domestic architecture can yet be seen in itscollective groups’’ (‘‘The Opening of the Crystal Palace,’’ cited in Choay, Invention, 215 n. 11; italicsare hers).

40. On the German notion of Stadbilt, townscape, see Kostof, ‘‘His Majesty the Pick,’’ 40; and Koshar,‘‘On Cults and Cultists,’’ in Giving Preservation a History, 48–49. The Heimatschutz movement, whichdeveloped after Prussia’s victory of 1870, was explicitly equated with conservation by the Czech arthistorian and theorist of conservation, Max Dvorak: he extrapolated the notion of ‘‘protection ofborders’’ to the ‘‘protection of culture.’’ See Catechismo per la tutela dei monumenti (1916) (Milano:Italia nostra, 1972; Italian translation of Katechismus der DenkmalpfIege, 1916, reprinted from Para-gone, no. 257).

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41. The memory-function of the monument is inherently ideological: ‘‘the past that is invoked and calledforth, in an almost incantatory way, is not just any past: it is localized and selected to a critical end,to the degree that it is capable of directly contributing to the maintenance and preservation of theidentity of an ethnic, religious, national, tribal, or familial community’’ (Choay, Invention, 5).

42. See Zucconi’s essay in this volume and La Citta Contesa, 109; and Etlin, Modernism in Italian Architec-ture, 119–24. For Rubbiani’s work in Bologna, see A. Shanken, ‘‘Preservation and Creation: AlfonsoRubbiani and Bologna,’’ Future Anterior 7, no. 1 (Summer 2010): 60–81. The center of Hildesheimwas ‘‘historicized’’ several times. A local building ordinance, passed around 1900, required all newwork visible from the street to be executed in forms and materials that were used up to the mid-seventeenth century. The town center was destroyed during World War II, and rebuilt in a contempo-rary idiom in the 1950s. The modern buildings were later replaced by historic replicas in the 1980s(Kostof, ‘‘His Majesty the Pick,’’ 40; Jokilehto, A History of Architectural Conservation, 283).

43. ‘‘The term restoration and the thing itself are both modern. To restore a building is not to preserveit, to repair, or rebuild it; it is to reinstate it in a condition of completeness that could never haveexisted at any given time’’ (Eugene Viollet-le-Duc, ‘‘On Restoration,’’ Dictionnaire raisonne, vol. 8,trans. M. F. Hearn, The Architectural Theory of Viollet-le-Duc: Readings and Commentary [Cambridge:MIT, 1990], 269).

44. Choay suggests that the idea of the ‘‘historic city’’ originated in the colonies (Invention, 130).45. See especially Hamadeh, ‘‘The Traditional City’’; Rabinow, French Modern; and G. Wright, The Politics

of Design in French Colonial Urbanism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).46. A report on the personal investigation of the emperor concluded ‘‘that the upper town must stay as

it is, since it is appropriate to the morals and habits of the natives; that the opening of wide arteriesis very harmful to them; and that these improvements must be seen as onerous to the indigenouspopulation, who do not have the same way of life as Europeans’’ (cited in Beguin, Arabaisances: Decorarchitecturale et trace urbaine en Afrique du Nord, 1830–1950 [Paris: Dunods, 1983], 14).

47. The architect Valensi, working in Tunis in the 1920s, wrote: ‘‘It is this old picturesque city—a jewel,a kind of business asset that one must be careful not to diminish—which makes Tunis famous;which makes our city incomparable to all the oriental cities in the Mediterranean basin and whichattracts tourists. As such, it is important that it always remain as it is’’ (cited in J. Abdelkafi, ‘‘LaMedina de Tunis: l’espace historique face au processus d’urbanisation de la capitale,’’ Present et avenirdes medinas [de Marrakech a Alep], Tours: C.N.R.S., no. 706, ‘‘Urbanisation au Maghreb,’’ fasc. 10–11,1982, p. 202). French Romantics were profoundly disillusioned with the modern transformation ofAlgiers, which they saw as destroying its picturesque character; see Hamadeh, ‘‘The Traditional City,’’246.

48. Conservation of the medina of Tunis seems to have been formalized as early as 1881; see S. Hama-deh, ‘‘The Traditional City,’’ 250. In this year Charles Buls became mayor of Brussels, where heworked to protect the historic center; he outlined his approach in Esthetique des Villes, 1893. On Bulsand his influence, see Rabinow, French Modern, 213–14; and Etlin, Modernism in Italian Architecture,106–8.

49. Rabinow, French Modern, 290; F. F. Beguin, Arabisances: Decor architecturale et trace urbaine en Afriquedu Nord, 1830–1950 (Paris: Dunod, 1983), 120; Hamadeh, ‘‘The Traditional City,’’ 252. The 1914 lawmay have been the first law in Europe or the colonies to provide for the conservation not only ofmonuments, but their context; and to define urban ensembles and even quarters as ‘‘monuments.’’In this, it differed from precedents in Italy and Tunis.

50. A. Abdelmajid, ‘‘Le paradoxe de la construction du fait patrimonial en situation coloniale. Le cas duMaroc,’’ Revue du monde musulman et de la Mediterranee 73–74, nos. 3–4 (1994): 157–58.

51. The dual city model was adopted, for example, by indigenous rulers like the Khedive Ismail, whodeveloped a ‘‘Paris on the Nile’’ beyond the old city limits (Kostof, The City Assembled, 274). Wheredirect colonial rule pertained, the dual city was colored by class as well as race: in Morocco, forexample, native elites petitioned for their own districts, apart from the French. Rabinow notes thatin their first plan for reforms the Jeunes Marocains (the sons of the elite toward whom Lyautey had


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directed his policies) objected not to the dual city doctrine, only to the favoritism shown to theFrench (French Modern, 287).

52. Kostof, The City Assembled, 43–59.53. Rabinow, French Modern, 238–41; and Hamadeh, ‘‘The Traditional City,’’ 253.54. See Etlin, Modernism in Italian Architecture, chap. 4.55. The name translates roughly as the Artistic Association of Aficionados of Architecture. As Zucconi

notes, Giovannoni was later discredited and written out of architectural history, because of hispresumed association with fascism and his generally anti-modernist stance. But his legacy neverthe-less influenced generations of practitioners: it used to be said, recalls Zucconi, that ‘‘we are allstudents of Giovannoni.’’ Guido Zucconi, personal communication with the author.

56. The idea of moving the nucleus of development outside the old core was not new. In 1888, forexample, Viollet-le-Duc praised the people of Berne who chose to ‘‘respect their ancient buildingsand to give modern construction its due by giving it a new zone’’ (Lettres de Suisse, cited in Etlin,Modernism in Italian Architecture).

57. Etlin, Modernism in Italian Architecture, 120.58. Etlin’s phrase, Ibid., 124.59. Piacentini’s notion of architectural prose was, as Etlin puts it, a kind of ‘‘self-effacing, background

building’’ (Modernism in Italian Architecture, 125). The term background building is still used byarchitects working in historic centers. Treatment of the lacuna in painting and monument restora-tion was theorized by Cesare Brandi, following principles of Gestalt psychology. Paul Phillippot,the main interpreter of Brandi, discussed the applicability of the concept to urban ensembles; see‘‘Philosophy, Criteria, Guidelines, II,’’ in Historical and Philosophical Issues in the Conservation of Cul-tural Heritage, ed. N. S. Price et al. (Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute), 363.

60. This term was used by Patrick Geddes around the same time, based on his experience in Edinburgh,Dublin, and India; see Kostof, The City Shaped, 86.

61. Vecchie Citta ed Edelizia Nuova, cited in Zucconi, La Citta Contesa, 110 (translation mine).62. Ibid., 109–10; Koshar, ‘‘On Cults and Cultists,’’ 49. For Piacentini, the architectural ‘‘prose’’ of cities

had a greater ‘‘ethnic’’ quality than monuments (Etlin, Modernism in Italian Architecture, 129).63. See Zucconi’s article in this volume. Contextualism was indebted to the late Romantic concept of

ambiente, an urban landscape characterized by homogeneity of style and variety in massing (Zucconi,La Citta Contesa, 109).

64. Quoted by Giovannoni and cited in Etlin, Modernism in Italian Architecture, 119.65. Zucconi writes: ‘‘The idea of safeguarding the environment becomes increasingly interwoven with

the evolution of instruments for defending individual monuments and art objects, according to anotion of protection (tutela) that assigns to each an interchangeable role’’ (La Citta Contesa, 102;translation mine). He notes the conflict between municipalities, which initiated modernizingschemes, and the state, which was asked to intervene to halt or modify them. But the state only hadat its disposal certain institutions created in 1875 for the protection of artistic assets (beni artistici).In developing their quasi-scientific discourse, the defenders of historic fabric drew especially onarchaeology; see especially 108.

66. In Charleston, discussions to include protections for the historic area south of Broad Street startedin the 1920s, and were incorporated into the 1931 zoning ordinance. Cities that adopted the modelincluded New Orleans (1937), Alexandria (1946), Georgetown (1950), Santa Fe (1953), and Boston(1955). See R. Weyeneth, ‘‘Ancestral Architecture: The Early Preservation Movement in Charleston,’’in Giving Preservation a History, 257–81.

67. The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning (translation of Urbanisme, Paris, 1925; New York: Dover, 1987),179.

68. S. von Moos, ‘‘From the ‘City for 3 Million Inhabitants’ to the ‘Plan Voisin’ ’’ (1968), in Le Corbusierin Perspective, ed, P. Serenyi (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1975), 128. The Plan Voisin pro-posed a tabula rasa between the Seine and Monmartre. Only a few select buildings and sites—the

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Louvre, the Palais-Royal, Place Vendome, Place de la Concorde, the Arc de Triomphe, several churchesand houses—would remain standing. In this way, wrote LeCorbusier, ‘‘the historical past, a universalpatrimony, is respected. More than that, it is saved’’ (Urbanisme, 272; cited and translated in S. vonMoos). The Italian Futurists’ hatred of historic cities is well-known; see Kostof, ‘‘His Majesty thePick,’’ 33, and Etlin, Modernism in Italian Architecture, xiv–xv.

69. According to the modern view, writes Riegl, ‘‘the new artifact requires flawless integrity of form andcolor as well as of style . . . the truly modern work must recall . . . earlier works as little as possible’’(‘‘The Modern Cult of Monuments,’’ cited in Colquhoun, ‘‘Newness and Age Value in Alois Riegl,’’ inModernity and the Classical Tradition: Architectural Essays 1980–1987 [Cambridge and London: MITPress, 1989], 214).

70. Ibid., 220.71. Under the auspices of the League of Nations Commission on Cultural Cooperation, the predecessor

of UNESCO. The Athens charter was the first international convention to focus on methodology.72. Jokilehto, A History of Architectural Conservation, 285. The Sarraz Declaration (1928), the founding

document of CIAM, states: ‘‘Urbanization cannot be conditioned by the claims of a pre-existentaestheticism; its essence is a functional order . . .’’ (cited in K. Frampton, Modern Architecture: ACritical History [London: Thames and Hudson, 2007], 269).

73. Warsaw is perhaps the most spectacular example: the exterior of buildings were carefully docu-mented during the war, and rebuilt afterward. The interiors of buildings were modernized, and theinterior of some blocks were dedensified. Despite the near total reconstruction of historic fabric, theold town was declared a World Heritage site; see C. Cameron, ‘‘From Warsaw to Mostar: the WorldHeritage Committee and Authenticity,’’ APT Bulletin 39, nos. 2–3 (2008): 19–24. On the rebuildingof Warsaw, see A. Ciborowski, Warsaw: A City Destroyed and Rebuilt (Warsaw: Polonia Publishing,1964); and A. Tung, Conserving the World’s Great Cities, chap. 4. Many towns had suffered greatdamage from artillery during World War I, resulting in debates over the nature of reconstruction(Jokilehto, A History of Architectural Conservation, 283–84).

74. See Denslagen, Architectural Restoration in Western Europe, 145–46; E. Charlesworth, Architects with-out Frontiers (Oxford: Architectural Press, 2006), chap. 2; and J. Diefendorf, In the Wake of War: theReconstruction of German Cities after World War II (New York: Oxford University Press), 281–83.Diefendorf argues that there was continuity, rather discontinuity, in municipal administration andurban planning before and after the war. In Germany, most citizens wanted to return as quickly aspossible to the world they had known before war: they sought to reestablish this world by buildingin regional styles, and where possible, rebuilding significant historic structures. Preservationistsopposed the latter, but were vetoed. Modernists wanted to rationalize the city, widening streets andbuilding in a new idiom, but they too were usually vetoed. While prewar streetlines were maintainedand historic facades restored or rebuilt, interiors were typically modernized.

75. In his memoir Moses wrote: ‘‘You can draw any kind of picture you like on a clean slate . . . but whenyou operate in an overbuilt metropolis you have to hack your way with a meat axe,’’ in Public Works:A Dangerous Trade (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970); cited in R. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Mosesand the Fall of New York (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), 849. See M. Berman’s assessment of theCross Bronx Expressway in All That Is Solid Melts into Air (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982),290–312.

76. See for example A. Flint, Wrestling with Moses (New York: Random House, 2011).77. A. Bigio, personal conversation.78. See Appleyard’s outline of four phases in the planning of European cities after the war, The Conserva-

tion of European Cities, 10–11. He dates the postwar building boom to the 1960s, but most sourcesdate it to the mid-1950s.

79. Aldo van Eyck and Theo Bosch supported residents in the Nieuwmarkt affair in Amsterdam, a pro-posal to run a four–lane road through the old core above a new metro line. See B. B. Taylor, ‘‘Lescontradictions d’une gestion social democrate,’’ L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui 180 (July–August 1975):30–42.


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80. C. Franck, ‘‘L’envers du decor, ou comment faire d’une vielle pierre deux coups,’’ L’Architecture d’Au-jourd’hui, vol. 180, special issue on historic centers (July–August 1975): 6. On the displacement oflong-time residents from gentrifying neighborhoods in the 1960s and 1970s in the United States,see Wallace, ‘‘Reflections on the History of Historic Preservation,’’ in Presenting the Past: Essays onHistory and the Public, ed. S. Porter Benson et al. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986),179–185. Wallace notes that preservation was sometimes used as a form of exclusionary zoning (fn.71, p. 390).

81. Choay, Invention, p. 131.82. Abdelkafi, ‘‘La Medina de Tunis,’’ 206. See other case studies in Present et avenir des medinas and

Bianca, Urban Form in the Arab World, 172–83.83. The Association pour la Sauvegarde de la Medina de Tunis is exceptional not only for of its early

foundation date and its longevity, but because of its historical reliance on local expertise.84. Said Zulficar, interview, Paris, May 2005.85. For a more extended treatment of this topic see the introduction to my book, Building a World

Heritage City: Sana’a, Yemen (Ashgate, forthcoming 2014).86. 1956, for example, saw the creation of Italia Nostra, an organization charged with raising public

awareness of conservation issues. On this period see G. Piccinato, ‘‘Words and History: Controversieson Urban Heritage in Italy,’’ in Culture, Urbanism, and Planning, ed. J. Monclus and M. Guardia(Aldershot: Ashgate 2006), 113–28; and ‘‘A Brief History of Italian Town Planning after 1945,’’ TownPlanning Review 81, no. 3 (2010): 237–59. See also F. De Pieri and P. Scrivano, ‘‘Representing the‘Historic Center’ of Bologna,’’ Urban History Review XXXIII, no. 1 (fall–summer 2004).

87. Key plans were those for Assisi (led by G. Astengo, from 1955); Siena (G. Piccinato, 1956); Urbino(G. De Carlo, from 1958); and Bologna (P. Cervellati, director of urbanism for the municipality, from1969; D. Pini, ‘‘Conservation and Planning Strategies for the Historic City in Italy 1950s–1970s,’’paper presented at ‘‘Conserving the City’’ symposium at the University of Pennsylvania School ofDesign, April 2012). The general strategy was called risanimento, literally, ‘‘making healthy again.’’The term has had various meanings (urban renewal, land reclamation, etc.) but derives from thenotion of hygiene-based intervention.

88. See Etlin, Modernism in Italian Architecture, 124–27.89. Piccinato, ‘‘A Brief History of Italian Town Planning,’’ 247. The conservation of the historic center

became a symbol of ‘‘Red Bologna’’: party ideology was clearly expressed in contemporary accounts;see, for example, F. Bandarin, ‘‘The Bologna Experience: Planning and Historic Renovation in a Com-munist City,’’ in Appleyard, The Conservation of European Cities, 178–202). See also R. Scannavini andC. De Angelis, Bologne: methodologies des alternatives pour l’architecture et l’urbanisme,’’ L’Architec-ture d’Aujourd’hui 180 (July–August 1975): 44–67; and De Pieri and Scrivano, ‘‘Representing the‘Historic Center’ of Bologna,’’ 34.

90. For example, Giancarlo De Carlo’s plan for Urbino, which considered the landscape as part of thehistoric city (D. Pini, ‘‘Conservation and Planning Strategies for the Historic City in Italy 1950s–1970s’’). The 1939 Saveri-Giovannoni Act had already introduced ‘‘landscape’’ as a strategy for con-serving wider areas, both urban and natural; see Zucconi’s essay in this volume.

91. Franck, ‘‘L’envers du decor,’’ 4.92. The reaction against urban renewal and language of high modernism was expressed by J. Jacobs in

The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961). See J. Scott’s impor-tant critique of ‘‘high modernist ideology’’ in Seeing Like a State, chap. 4.

93. The ‘‘rediscovery’’ of the old city in fact started earlier, for example, in the Townscape Movementin Britain. But it was marginalized by both the architectural/planning establishment and by mostarchitectural critics. See C. Klemek, The Transatlantic Collapse of Urban Renewal: Postwar Urbanismfrom New York to Berlin (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2011), chapter 3.

94. The term ‘‘heritage’’ was first heard in the 1960s in the United States; by the early 1980s, it waswidespread in use (Larkham, Conservation and the City, 13). Choay notes that only in the 1960s didthe term ‘‘culture’’ come into widespread use, replacing the older term ‘‘civilization’’ (Invention, 142).

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95. E. Afinoguenova and J. Martı-Olivella, ‘‘A Nation Under Tourists’ Eyes,’’ in Spain is (Still) Different:Tourism and Discourse in Spanish Identity, ed. Afinoguenova and Martı-Olivella (Lanham, Md.: Lexing-ton Books, 2008), xx–xxiv. The economic potential of historic centers had been envisioned for dec-ades, even during the colonial period (cf. note 47, above). See for example Piccinato, ‘‘Words andHistory,’’ 119; G. Ashworth and J. Tunbridge, The Tourist-Historic City (London and New York: Belha-ven Press, 1990), 51–62; Wallace, ‘‘Reflections,’’ 175–76; and various essays in Mason and Page,Giving Preservation a History.

96. In the United States preservationists worked alongside environmentalists to win the EnvironmentalProtection Act of 1969, which strengthened their position (Wallace, ‘‘Reflections,’’ 185). See also ‘‘InSearch of Collaboration: Historic Preservation and the Environmental Movement,’’ PreservationForum, Information series no. 71, 1992.

97. Choay, Invention, 143–44; Franck, ‘‘L’envers du decor,’’ 4.98. Wallace, ‘‘Reflections,’’ 189. The fiscal crisis of New York and other cities led quickly to restructuring

and gentrification. Historicizing architecture—here, ‘‘postmodernism’’—and conservation were,once again, two faces of the coin. See N. Smith, The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and theRevanchist City (London: Routledge, 1996).

99. See B. Smith’s essay in this volume; see also B. Smith and C. Elefante, ‘‘Sustainable Design in HistoricBuildings: Foundations and the Future,’’ APT Bulletin 40, nos. 3–4 (2009): 20–21. The Historic TaxCredit Program was established in 1976, and the Secretary of Interior Standards were first elaboratedin 1979; see http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-1995-07-12/pdf/95-16953.pdf (accessed November11, 2013). For an overview of the package of legislative reforms, of which the Tax Credit programwas a part, see Wallace, ‘‘Reflections,’’ 186.

100. The first graduate courses in the United States were organized at Columbia in 1964 (by JamesMarston Fitch); by 1975, some 90 universities in the United States and Canada had preservationdegrees or preservation-related programs (Wallace, ‘‘Reflections,’’ 189).

101. On the two different understandings of conservation, which grew apart on the postwar period, seeR. Maguire, ‘‘Conservation and Diverging Philosophies,’’ Journal of Architectural Conservation, no. 1(March 1997): 7–18.

102. Baird Smith addressed these questions directly, which led to his participation in this volume.103. In this, Choay draws a parallel with Pugin’s Contrasts (Invention, p. 120).104. The reference here is to Mumford’s characterization of the city (‘‘What is a City?’’ Architectural Record

[1937]: 92–96).105. Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, chap. 10. For a retrospective view, see Jacobs’s

obituary by N. Ouroussoff, ‘‘Outgrowing Jane Jacobs and Her New York,’’ New York Times, April 30,2006. On the city-as-theme-park, see especially Ada Louis Huxtable, Unreal America: Architecture andIllusion (New York: New Press), 1997.

106. On ‘‘sameness’’ see Paul Ricoeur’s essay, ‘‘Universal Civilization and National Cultures,’’ whichbecame a rallying point for ‘‘critical regionalism’’ in the 1980s (History and Truth [Evanston: North-western University Press, 1965], 271–86).

107. Daniele Pini estimates that when an historic center in Italy is restored, two thirds of the populationleave within ten years. Personal communication with the author.

108. On the real costs of architecture and urbanism, see ‘‘The Aesthetics of Negligence: Architecture andRecession in the Age of Deleveraging,’’ Dialectic 2: Architecture between Boom and Bust (Winter 2014).On the bifurcation of the contemporary city, see Ladd’s essay in this volume.

109. On the relationship between density, social justice, and sustainability see D. Rypkema, ‘‘HistoricPreservation and Affordable Housing: The Missed Connection,’’ National Trust for Historic Preserva-tion, August 2002.

110. See G. Packer, ‘‘Broken Contract: Inequality and American Decline,’’ Foreign Affairs (November/December 2011).

111. Lewis Mumford famously described the city, along with language, as ‘‘man’s greatest work of art.’’But it is a ‘‘collective work of art’’; and ‘‘a symphony: specialized human aptitudes, specialized instru-ments, give rise to sonorous results which, neither in volume nor in quality, could be achieved by


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any single piece.’’ Mumford seems to have in mind a contemporary notion of the work of art: onethat is shaped by multiple authors over time: the city is the product of diverse and clashing ‘‘time-structures’’ (The Culture of Cities, 1938, 3–6). For a wider view of the term ‘‘urbanization’’ see D.Harvey, ‘‘Right to the City,’’ New Left Review 53 (September–October 2008): 1–16.

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AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES

Daniel Benjamin Abramson is Associate Professor of Urban Design and Planning; Adjunct

Associate Professor of Architecture and Landscape Architecture; and member of the China

Studies Faculty at the University of Washington, Seattle. He holds a B.A. degree in history

from Harvard University; master’s degrees in architecture and city planning from the Mas-

sachusetts Institute of Technology; and a doctorate in urban planning from Tsinghua Uni-

versity, Beijing. He has undertaken scholarly exchange, teaching, research, publication, and

practical planning and design for urban and rural conservation and development across

China, and in historic Chinatowns of Vancouver and Seattle, as well as historic mills in

New England.

Brian Ladd, a research associate in history at the University at Albany, is the author of

Urban Planning and Civic Order in Germany, 1860–1914 (1990); The Ghosts of Berlin (1997);

and Autophobia: Love and Hate in the Automotive Age (2008).

Michele Lamprakos teaches at the School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at

the University of Maryland–College Park, where she holds a joint appointment in the

Architecture and Historic Preservation programs. Trained as an architect and an historian,

she is interested in the historical layers of buildings and cities, and their ongoing transfor-

mation in the present. Her career has combined teaching, research, and practice in archi-

tecture and preservation, with a geographical focus on the Mediterranean and the Middle

East.

Peter J. Larkham is Professor of Planning at Birmingham City University, U.K. He has

researched and published widely in urban form, change, and conservation. Most recently

he has worked on the period of wartime and postwar reconstruction, trying to explain

why today’s cities took the shape we have inherited from this crucial period. He recently

co-edited The Blitz and Its Legacy (Ashgate, 2013, with Mark Clapson).

Randall Mason is Associate Professor and Chair of the Graduate Program in Historic

Preservation at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Design. His education includes

degrees in geography from Bucknell and Penn State, and a Ph.D. in urban planning from

Columbia University; his books include The Once and Future New York, on the origins of

historic preservation in New York City (University of Minnesota Press, 2009, winner of

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the SAH’s Antoinette Forester Downing Award), and Giving Preservation a History (with

Max Page; Routledge, 2004). Forthcoming works include a book on the economics of his-

toric preservation and several essays on urban history and urban conservation. In 2012–

13, Mason held the National Endowment for the Arts Rome Prize at the American

Academy in Rome.

Kevin D. Murphy is Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Humanities and Professor of History

of Art at Vanderbilt University. Previously, he taught at the Graduate Center of the City

University of New York and in the School of Architecture at the University of Virginia. He

is the author of Memory and Modernity: Viollet-le-Duc at Vezelay (2000) as well as other

books and articles, many of which focus on the history of the preservation movements in

France and the United States.

Baird Smith, FAIA, FAPT, Director of Preservation, is a senior project manager and princi-

pal for Quinn Evans Architects in Washington, D.C. Smith directs projects throughout the

Mid-Atlantic area ranging from small consulting efforts to multi-million-dollar building

preservation projects for both the private and public sectors, including a host of nonprofit

organizations. His public sector experience includes work with every major federal agency

as well as with state, county, and local governments and universities. His work includes

projects at more than twenty National Historic Landmarks and six hundred buildings

listed on the National Register. Smith was inducted into the College of Fellows of both the

Association of Preservation Technology (APT) and the American Institute of Architects.

James L. Wescoat Jr. is Aga Khan Professor in the Department of Architecture at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he offers courses on water resources, land-

scape history and theory, heritage conservation, and disaster-resilient design. His research

concentrates on water systems in South Asia and the United States from the site to river

basin scales. For much of his career, Wescoat has focused on the small-scale historical

waterworks of Mughal gardens and cities in India and Pakistan. At the larger scale, Wes-

coat has conducted water policy research in the Colorado, Indus, Ganges, Great Lakes, and

Mississippi River basins. He has a long-standing interest in cultural exchange between

South Asia and North America.

Guido Zucconi teaches at the University IUAV of Venice. He has also taught at the Politec-

nico di Milano and the University of Udine, and has been visiting professor at the Univer-

sity of Edinburgh, Fudan University in Shanghai, and the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes

in Paris. His main field of interest is Italian architecture, urban history, and conservation

in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His books include La citta contesa 1885–1942

(1989) and L’invenzione del passato, focused on Camillo Boito and neo-medieval architec-

ture in Italy (1997); he has edited collections on the work of Camillo Sitte (1992), Gustavo

Giovannoni (1997), and Daniele Donghi (2006).

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CALL FOR PAPERS

Landscape and Climate Change

Fall 2015

Guest Editor: Robert Melnick

Whether climate change is human-induced or part of the natural cycle of events, there is

no doubt that it is impacting our planet and our heritage resources. Modern climate

change science began in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and was accelerated in

the third quarter of the twentieth century. In more recent years, there has been a growing

recognition of the real and potential impacts of climate change, especially on natural sys-

tems, such as temperature, sea levels, storm occurrence and intensity, temperature ranges,

and vegetative patterns.

More recently, research has turned to the impact of climate change on significant

cultural resources, including historic structures and archeological sites. This work, how-

ever, has only now begun to address the impact of climate change on cultural landscapes.

There is a growing need for a broader understanding in a number of areas, including: the

differences between global change and local or regional impacts; potential policy implica-

tions; and models for adaptation and intervention. Among the factors that need to be

considered, within a range of climate change impacts on cultural landscapes, are: tempera-

ture fluctuation, water cycle modification, vegetation management, invasive species, and

change in fire occurrence, as well as the potential for increased land development pres-

sures. Basic to this discussion, but not always articulated, are the fundamental issues of

integrity and character-defining features in a resource type that is inherently dynamic.

This issue will explore many facets of the impacts of climate change on significant

cultural landscapes. We look for a range of topics that include case studies, theoretical and

philosophical examinations of this topic, the position of cultural landscapes in the larger

historic preservation discourse on climate change, and applicable lessons from other disci-

plines. The goal is to provide a basis from which our responses to known and unknown

impacts of climate on cultural landscapes can be advanced.

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Ruskin Redux

Spring 2016

Guest Editor: John Dixon Hunt

The spring 2016 issue of Change Over Time is planned on the preservation ideas and

practice of John Ruskin. This is a call for two responses: (1) articles and topics; and (2)

for an anthology of Ruskin’s relevant writings which COT will offer. This last is intended

as a collection of Ruskin’s remarks on preservation, excluding the most obvious piece on

‘‘The Lamp of Memory’’: letters, diaries, other writings, whether in fragments or larger

passages (please give us references). The editor will gather these and organize them, with

proper acknowledgment of suggestions made, in an effort to collect and present a compen-

dium of Ruskin’s remarks on this topic as an eminently usable tool for reference. This

would complement not only the Cook and Wedderburn edition of Ruskin’s writing, but of

the considerable publication of materials since his death. Submittal inquiries may be sent

to John Dixon Hunt ([email protected]), guest editor.

Articles are generally restricted to 7,500 or fewer words (the approximate equivalent to

thirty pages of double-spaced, twelve-point type) and may include up to ten images. The

deadline for submission of manuscripts for the fall 2015 Landscape and Climate Change

issue is September 1, 2014, and manuscripts must be submitted by February 2, 2015

for Ruskin Redux. Guidelines for authors may be requested from Meredith Keller

([email protected]), to whom manuscripts should also be submitted. For further

information please visit cot.pennpress.org.

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UPCOMING ISSUESThe Venice Charter at Fifty

Fall 2014

VandalismSpring 2015

Landscape and Climate ChangeFall 2015

Ruskin ReduxSpring 2016

National Park Service CentenaryFall 2016

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ChangeOver Time4.1A N I N T E R N A T I O N A L J O U R N A L

O F C O N S E R V A T I O N A N D

T H E B U I L T E N V I R O N M E N T

S P R I N G 2 0 1 4

Change O

ver Time

SP

RI

NG

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UPCOMING ISSUES

The Venice Charter at 50F A L L 2 0 1 4

VandalismS P R I N G 2 0 1 5

Landscape and Climate ChangeF A L L 2 0 1 5

Ruskin ReduxS P R I N G 2 0 1 6

National Park Service CentenaryF A L L 2 0 1 6

The Idea of the Historic City

Documents

Transcript of The Idea of the Historic City