How Do We Preserve Architectural History and Prepare for the Future at the Same Time?

Some of the immediate—and immense—questions that have been raised following the recent wildfires that have swept greater Los Angeles, or the flooding and destruction wrought by hurricanes across the South, have been about how communities will preserve and rebuild historic and cultural sites. The responses are taking many different forms, from an ad hoc architectural and design Slack channel that’s sprung up in LA, and the Helene Design Pledge launched by North Carolina nonprofit MountainTime, to the countless mutual aid organizations working in LA and across the South. How local architects, preservation advocates, planners, and policymakers will be navigating these challenges is critical when uncertainty, and unpredictable federal responses, seem to be the only sure thing.

One resource advocates and practitioners should look to is Erica Avrami’s new book, Second-Order Preservation: Social Justice and Climate Action Through Heritage Policy. Avrami, a professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, previously worked as the Director of Research and Education at the World Monuments Fund and has edited recent books detailing efforts to develop more evidence-driven historic preservation policy and make the field more inclusive. She argues that while protecting buildings is meaningful work, preservation needs to do more than simply focusing on saving buildings (and as many of them as possible) if we want to address historic inequities and prepare for apocalyptic climate disasters. Our conversation has been edited for content and clarity.

Dwell: Historic preservation advocates have long focused on saving individual buildings and places. Would you talk about why preservationists need to augment their approach and incorporate "second-order thinking" as part of this work? 

Erica Avrami: Historic preservation is built upon the passionate investment of advocates working to ensure the transfer of understanding, knowledge, tradition, or practice across generations. That’s so important, but the "first order" logic—"how do we benefit from this place if we don’t save it?"—needs to expand to consider some "second-order" consequences. For me, it’s about taking a step back. What will happen five or ten years from now? What are the consequences, intended or unintended, we can anticipate as a result of saving a place? Does it advantage some people and disadvantage others? What does it mean, not just for the people who own it, but those who may visit it, whose stories are bound up in or made invisible by it? Working to protect something under threat will always be part of the preservation toolbox. I’m not trying to diminish that, but we also need to think about this.

One example I often use is what happens when you try to protect a historic district from flooding caused by sea level rise. If you were to build a sea wall to protect that neighborhood or that district, we have to think of ways water can continue to flow through or under the building, otherwise the diverted water is going to endanger another neighborhood. We can’t just look at the one building or place we’re interested in saving; we need to understand the dynamics and implications of what saving that place does both to the broader environment as well as diverse publics.

In your book, you bring up the case of 857 Riverside Drive in New York City as an example of "procedural injustice." It’s a 19th century home, owned by abolitionists, and a possible Underground Railroad site in New York City that didn’t receive landmark status. What are some of the issues with existing preservation standards, and how can preservation policy broaden its mindset?

Material integrity is the idea that we have to ensure that "enough" of a building or place’s original, historic material or form survives in order for it to effectively communicate its history. I would question that because it can create a problematic and unjust metric. That’s not to say experiencing a place as it was 100 or 200 years ago isn’t important, but when we are trying to ensure that publics who have been systematically marginalized are represented within our historic built environment, then we need to look back and account for the ways in which policy undermined their ability to preserve that material integrity across generations. Redlining, which predominantly happened in low income communities, immigrant communities, and communities of color, affected the capacity of those publics to access capital for the maintenance and improvement of their properties. The condition of those properties today may reflect that discrimination. When preservation is being considered, all too often, there may be an argument that a place can’t be preserved because the material integrity just isn't there anymore. It doesn’t mean that the place is any less historic, any less important, or any less valued by people.

There are also many cases of sites which lack documentation or where there isn’t enough archival evidence. The Underground Railroad’s work, for example, was being done in secret. No one was documenting this or trying to provide a record for history. If we don’t acknowledge or recognize that this creates a disadvantage in our system, which gets repeated every time we apply material integrity or documentation standards to historic designations then we are repeating that injustice and compounding it. I think it’s really important to consider a wider lens of what constitutes preservation.

It seems unlikely that there will be new federal efforts to address the underlying causes of the climate crisis anytime soon. In the meantime, are there things that communities and local preservation organizations can be proactively planning or envisioning to limit reactive decision-making in the aftermath of a disaster?

That is a big question. There are logical questions like "how do we reduce flood and fire risk?" "How do you ensure that when more extreme weather events happen the likelihood of damage is decreased?" Certainly all of that is possible, but it won’t necessarily be enough to think about this at a property-by-property level. That’s where these questions of climate and justice are really so fraught, right?

When it comes to the advocacy organizations, everyone is so focused on "What are we going to do with our buildings and our community?" but it’s important that they talk to others and think about how their work is being amalgamated with the work of so many communities. We need to be doing more investive work in this question of place attachment: "How or why do people feel so vested in particular landscapes or communities?" It’s so fundamental to the work of preservation and we get at it by describing the architecture or cultural significance of the object, but we don’t go too deeply into the social dimension of that attachment to place. We only broach it to a certain extent, but that’s where we’re beginning to understand what will be important for communities to save. What is it about the social and spatial dynamics of this community that will be important to recreate in a new place if a community is displaced or we have to move? I would love to see community-based preservation organizations putting more focus on a place’s values and relationships, so that when disaster strikes there’s an understanding of the important social spatial dynamics that need to be addressed quickly. It’s not just saving the buildings, right?

After Hurricane Sandy, we saw communities in New York that elevated their houses. What does that mean for street life? There’s no longer that liminal space, the interplay and understanding, between the public on the sidewalk versus private property. If you elevate all the houses on a street, it will have aesthetic implications, but how do we interact with our neighbors and see the streetscape? What does it mean when we fracture those connections? Understanding communities and getting at those deep, historical research questions should be so natural to preservationists, but we still enter that arena with a fair degree of trepidation because it deals so much with social dimensions.

How can preservation advocates integrate social justice and climate consciousness into their work?

It goes back to first order versus second-order thinking. If you are just looking at saving a building, then there’s a problem. I strongly advise people to look at your local preservation ordinance to see its rationale and what it’s trying to achieve for people. In a few cases, we’ve seen displacement prevention, environmental concerns, economics, and public welfare. Then look at what your local preservation organization or agency is doing across all those public policy rationales. It’s not about turning preservation organizations into a climate change organization, but forging connections. Some of this is just showing up, right? In doing so, we learn to compromise, negotiate, and be creative in mutually beneficial ways.

Top photos (clockwise from left): Sarah Reingewirtz/MediaNews Group/Los Angeles Daily News via Getty Images; Scott Cunningham/Getty Images; Courtesy of Minnesota University Press; Kena Betancur/Getty Images

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