Historic Preservation

Historic preservation is the specialized, interdisciplinary study and treatment of historically significant movable and immovable objects, including landscapes. This term is used only in the United States; other countries prefer the word conservation to preservation and contextualize the meaning, as in such terms as urban conservation or building conservation. The chief concerns of historic preservation are to establish why certain [Page 1435]older places have acquired value over time and to identify methods that retain the historical integrity of building and landscape fabric. The overall goal is to ensure that changes to these places are made in a manner that does not impair their historical authenticity.

Historic row houses line a street on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.

Source: Christopher Messer/iStockphoto.

Within the discipline of geography, historic preservation is primarily associated with cultural landscapes, material culture, and the work of cultural geographers such as Henry Glassie, Fred Kniffen, and J. B. Jackson and secondarily with perception, behavior, place attachment, and the work of humanistic geographers such as David Lowenthal, Yi-Fu Tuan, and David Seamon. Geography's contribution to historic preservation is typically restricted to helping define significance; it has not yet been a major player in discussions of policy, interventions, and management. Historic preservation therefore remains largely dominated by built environment disciplines such as architecture, landscape architecture, and planning. Since the 1980s, historic preservation has been recognized as a discipline in its own right, with unique theoretical and epistemological foundations, novel research methods, and its own university degree programs and practitioners.

Economics, sustainability, and place making are typical arguments for engaging in historic preservation. Examples include the National Trust for Historic Preservation's highly successful “Main Street” program for downtown revitalization, the addition of pro-preservation measures in [Page 1436]“green” building standards such as LEED 3.0 (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) that consider energy used in production and construction, and the connection between preservation, sense of place, and well-being. The traditional approach of treating places and buildings as museums is still evident but increasingly unsustainable in economic as well as cultural terms.

In the United States, the National Park Service's National Register of Historic Places nomination is the standard used to define historical significance, while the Secretary of the Interior's Standards for the Treatment of Historic Properties prescribes specific treatments for the “preservation,” “restoration,” “rehabilitation,” and “reconstruction” of buildings and landscapes. Although these guidelines are only required for federal interventions, they have essentially become universal in their application due to their widespread adoption by local and state governments.

In recent years, there has been a shift toward the importance of sociocultural values in defining historical significance, but these ideas are yet to affect the day-to-day practice of historic preservation and are entirely absent from the criteria found in the National Register nomination. Critics charge that historic preservation remains a positivistic endeavor more concerned with the acquisition of “facts” than with fostering a sense of place and human flourishing.