Historic preservation organizations (and organizing) and the 21st Century (Part 1)

Will wrote this in response to another blog entry:

look at the latest capitol hill restoration society newsletter-they are firmly pro-parking and against scuttling the minimum parking requirements. We need to get these morons away from parking preservation and focused on actual historic preservation. All of these #$%^&* drive cars and are focused primarily on automobility- period. Something is wrong with these people. They need to move out to Centerville or Herndon and forget about living in a real city.T his is my beef with the "historic preservationist " community.

That brings me to this point, which I have probably written about in some fashion before...

At the heart, historic preservation is really about neighborhood livability. My thinking about the historic preservation movement in DC, in response to a presentation by Cameron Logan about his dissertation on planning in DC from 1950-20, is threefold: (1) most of the organizations were created during periods when the neighborhoods were moved to organize out of a need to protect themselves against either federal "transgression" such as freeway plans--which is why CHRS was first founded--or urban decline and/or demolition threats and the need to stabilize neighborhoods;

(2) that the downside of the creation of a strong neighborhood preservation movement is a strengthening of parochialism and a redirecting of citizen interests away from a broader, more citywide understanding of issues.

CHRS is bifurcated (note that I am an on and off again member and that the preservation study of the H Street neighborhood that I led in 2001-2002 received a grant from CHRS for which I am still grateful and I think that by and large, the organization is great). On the one hand, because its interest area includes areas--Hill East and the H Street neighborhood--that aren't designated historic districts, CHRS is far more attuned to a variety of broader urban design concerns that a typical neighborhood organization doesn't think about or have to wrestle with much. In other words, it makes them more broadly focused than a typical neighborhood association.

On the other hand, CHRS was forged during a different time, one of decline, and I think today things are different--the city is growing in population, income, and resources, and there is greater demand to live here and to accommodate new population in new buildings. Yet, most neighborhood associations and even some citywide ones, such as the Committee of 100 on the Federal City, haven't begun a process of adjusting to this new dialectic. Instead they are still mostly reactive and focused on an automobile-based paradigm when it comes to considering some of the most pressing urban issues facing the city today.

When I first started the blog, and in my original description of myself in the blogger profile, historic preservation as a topic was much more prominent. I expected to write a lot more about historic preservation than I do.

I still think that in key respects it is essential to the city's core competitive advantages. But my understanding of the core advantages has become a bit more nuanced, and this has changed what I write about most frequently, because of what I deem most important.

I used to say (and write in various testimonies) that the City of Washington has four core competitive advantages:

1. Historic architecture
2. History, authenticity and identity
3. a rich transportation infrastructure that supports non-automobile based mobility
4. the steady employment engine of the federal government.

Everything that the city does that ignores any of the first three advantages negatively impacts the fourth, but also diminishes the quality of the city's livability.

I have since realized that I combined two different things into the first point, both historic architecture as well as L'Enfant's conception of and urban design for the original City of Washington (of which the form has has been extended beyond the original city borders of Florida Avenue and the Anacostia River), therefore I modified the core advantages listing to a total of 5:

1. Historic architecture
2. Pedestrian-centric urban design
3. History, authenticity and identity
4. a rich transportation infrastructure that supports non-automobile based mobility
5. the steady employment engine of the federal government.

And I end up writing mostly about urban design and transportation as a result.

This is because transportation, especially efficient public transit complemented by walkability and bikability, is essential to the city's competitive advantages vis-a-vis the other places in the region that compete for employers (for profit and nonprofit) and residents. Urban design not only supports transit, walkability, and bicycling, but it supports other qualities that make the city a great place to live, work, or visit.

(3) So, in the context of the ever changing city, the third point about the historic preservation movement is that the movement needs to refashion itself to be responsive to and supportive of the 21st Century conditions of the City of Washington, which center around growth, infill construction, some intensification of land use, strengthening and leveraging the large public investment in public transit, and reducing the focus on private automobile-based mobility.

In other words, neighborhoods aren't declining, they are improving, adding residents, and are capable of thriving.

However, thriving urban neighborhoods aren't capable of thriving under automobile-centric conditions and policies. Sadly, most of us in the U.S. (except for those who live/lived in San Francisco or Manhattan and Brooklyn) are shaped by an automobile-centric land use and transportation planing paradigm, and we apply that paradigm unwittingly, to the center cities that we live in as well, where that model is inappropriate, because we don't know any better.

That is the struggle we have today in most neighborhoods, whether or not it concerns historic preservation. This struggle is over all kinds of issues including historic preservation sure, but also commercial district revitalization, mixed use development, leveraging land use around transit stations, accommodating parking, strengthening public transit, even public art, neighborhood schools, streetscape improvement, accommodating walkers and bicyclists, etc.

In the City of Washington, this isn't only a problem that must be addressed by preservation organizations. Frankly, I think most neighborhood civic associations are similarly hidebound, as are many Advistory Neighborhood Commissions.

Seriously, many times I wonder if given how public participation works today, if we could even build the City of Washington that we have today, warts and all.

But since at the core I am a preservationist, I probably care most about historic preservation organizations being able to be responsible and proactive with regard to this century's conditions, rather than looking at today's issues through the lenses of glasses constructed in response to problems from the 1960s-1980s.

Part 2, probably won't come until Tuesday, and it's about organizing and reaching out to and including younger folk and reorganizing organizations to be responsive to new residents, new constituencies, and a lack of understanding of what happened in the city say before 2003.