(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 570: Buildings are Here to Help People

This week I’m joined by Jeremy Wells to discuss his book Managing the Magic of Old Places: Crafting Public Policies for People-Centered Historic Preservation.  We chat the impact of old places on people’s emotions and the current state of the preservation profession. We also discuss the struggle in the field to legitimize the impact of environmental psychology on the built environment, classical architecture and white supremacy, and the differences between cultures in preservation approaches.

You can listen to this episode at Streetsblog USA or find it in our hosting archive.

Below is a full transcript of the episode generated by AI and unedited due to time constraints…

So I’ve got, oh, a couple decades of experience in the world of higher education and historic preservation. And before that I was leading the historic preservation program for the city of Denver. I’ve worked in Main Street, I’ve done work in architecture, materials conservation, so a lot of stuff that’s happening pretty much in every segment of what you would think of as historic preservation.

But more recently I’ve had the, luxury really of actually being able to spend a bit more time with my family and, in my music. So I do electronic music, combining that with folk, which is an absolute blast.

I was signed to a couple of record labels. Back in the nineties, one of ’em was in Germany. And so I did techno music and then ambient electronic. And, I had a pretty strong fan following base, but it’s hard in the music world to make enough money to actually make it your career. And so that, it segued into something that was more, reasonable perhaps.

but it was, it’s been really cool to get back into that world. And in fact, my old project, which is called Violet aa, I just released a remastered version of our first album, and it’s like people are buying it again. It’s Whoa. Whoa. That’s awesome. People actually, it’s didn’t realize that.

So yeah, it’s fun.

And so I combine it together. as much as I, would spend a lot of time, a little bit further in my preservation past, like researching architectural history and public history, local history of sites, I’ve done the same thing with what’s the history of the development of medieval music And, my personal interest is in the music of the Iberian Peninsula, Spanish and Portuguese, which has a really cool influence historically from the Middle East, from the mos.

So the thread is absolutely the interest in history.

So I’d be interested to read a book about that. That’d be fascinating.

You’re making me think that, huh? That would be interesting to look at.

So before all of this professionalization of the field started in the US and really abroad, it’s very similar. There’s a public movement, people who are interested in saving older places for lots of different reasons, and that interest, that movement, political movement really is what spurred the development of public preservation policy in the us.

And what I’ve done a lot of work studying is the differences between public perception and the perception of the experts that actually do preservation practice. Because the reasons why people both historically and to the present want to save all the buildings in places and especially what they think is important in terms of authenticity.

Protecting the authenticity of these places can be very different than preservation doctrine and policy, which are the guidelines that’s used by most preservation practice. So something as simple as people’s emotional connection to places like the research that I’ve done, which is very strongly focused on this area, is one of the most common reasons that the public, a member of the public would like.

Values or thinks a older place is important, can often be reduced down to an emotional attachment to that place attachment. So I’m using environmental psychology and it’s a very subjective experience, obviously, can be a very individualistic experience. And the really fascinating thing is this disconnect that I found between the perspective of a member of the public on that and the people who practice in preservation because of the doctrine and policy, which not only don’t recognize emotional attachments to places, but they actually work against it to make historic preservation into kind of a, I’m not the only one that’s used this phrase, but a pseudoscientific enterprise that tries to make things as objective as possible about the built environment to make it easier to administer, especially in a regulatory environment.

So that’s an example of this really strong difference between why the public might. I think preservation is important and the drive that professionals working in preservation think it’s important. And I’ll add something else in here too that’s fascinating. And as far as I know, I’ve been the only one that’s done this work.

But if you actually look at the psychological profile of people, just you take a random sample of, a group of people that represent the public, and you look at practicing professionals, historic preservation field, they have different perceptions about the older built environment. So people who work in preservation are more likely to think older places are newer than the public.

They’re more likely to perceive patina in decay in different ways. And so these factors, it looks like there’s the potential that there’s actually a difference in how practicing professionals in the preservation world experience the older built environment compared to, an average member of the public.

And that starts to explain some of these differences. But it’s such a beginning look at this potential difference that I, I’m a little careful to like overly generalize from what that means. All I can say right now is in my own research, there’s absolutely psychological differences in perception and valuation based on whether or not you practice in preservation or you’re just a general member of the public.

again, what that is and why that is, it’s hard to narrow it down beyond that point,

The mystery, the sense of what in the world happened here? Why has it been abandoned? Or even like thinking of the future, what’s gonna happen to this place? And so that kind of set in motion for me, this interest in. People’s emotional attachment to place. ’cause that’s where I started. For other people, if you talk in the preservation world, there’s often a very strong aesthetic attachment to the older built environment.

beauty. This is actually, I’ve not published research on this, but I’ve started doing some content analysis of historic preservation videos on YouTube. And one of the most common phrases that people in the preservation world use is that places are treasures. Or their gems, it’s an elevation of like this rarefied artistic value that seems to potentially attract certainly a fair number of people to the preservation field because that’s the words that they’re actually using.

So that seems to be maybe most people, I would say, just from my personal experience, I can’t point to any sort of generalizable study on that. But for many other people, the reason they’re interested, even in a professional sense in the older built environment is because they have connections through their community to this place.

So I’m thinking of people who have in the past say, 10, 15 years been interested in preservation as a vehicle to, preserve African American history. And so people from marginalized groups getting involved in preservation practice, and they often do it, interestingly enough, not from the preservation world, but they’re often planners or people from other disciplines that are coming in and then doing preservation, because often they find that there’s much more flexibility than coming in through the preservation world.

That, especially marginalized, communities and the places that are important to them can be very difficult to sometimes get recognized by the official preservation system in terms of listing on a local or a national register. And so working outside that system can often be much more useful and productive.

there’s a huge number of reasons why people are just in preservation.

And so the answer to that, if you look at, full-time paid positions in the historic preservation field, about 70% of the people who work in historic preservation are involved in regulatory compliance. So the primary reason their job exists is to satisfy a statutory obligation at the federal, the state, or the local level.

So of that 70%, about 40% is at the local level. And so these are people who work as, they’re often called preservation planners, but they’re staff that support what are called local historic preservation commissions. And, interestingly enough, they’re more often than not in planning departments, but they tend to be, they work very separately because while especially, long range planners are not as mostly like the zoning permitting, even planners working in zoning permitting.

Often work in much larger areas, especially in cities. Preservationists working in local government will more often than not be working with the frontline permit staff and development services. And so the worlds are different, even though preservation at the local level is often put with planning. It’s actually much better and logical fit with development services in terms of city government.

And then at the federal level, you get people working in environmental compliance. So the National Star Preservation Act refers to this as section one oh six. We call this section one oh six compliance. And so anytime the federal government does what’s called an undertaking, they wanna demolish something.

this came up with the White House. And, but actually

And so states have this at the state level, but for the most part it parallels Federal Environmental Review. So that’s 70% of the practice in historic preservation. A lot of this overlaps with what’s called cultural resource management, so with archeology, but like this is above ground stuff. And then you’ve got like about 10% of people that work in construction and architecture, so preservation architects or contractors that are doing preservation work.

And then it splits up a little bit smaller than that, people who work in preservation advocacy, like the National Trust of Historic Preservation, all the states pretty much have a statewide preservation advocacy organization. There are some at the local level, and then you have a much smaller subset of people who are working specifically in downtown revitalization.

So this is like called Main Street Programs. And then last little small part is, historic site management and interpretation. you go to a state historic site and the people who run that are paid professionals in the preservation field, managing and helping to preserve an historic site.

And often in the context of, I’ll call it this old house. So you know, saving old houses and rehabilitating them, renovating them, that’s a very strong public perception. And the other strong public perception that’s at a secondary level is, like what I mentioned, historic sites, museums, that’s a big thing.

And most members of the public, based on these surveys, don’t think very much about the regulatory environment in terms of like how many people actually work in that area, even though that is the big area in historic preservation. So there’s a big disconnect in terms of what the public actually thinks of historic preservation work and the work that actually gets done in it.

And then the people who work in preservation, I would say conversely, they don’t really want to be identified with being driven by the regulatory environment because, and it’s fascinating when you read people in the preservation world talk about how they’re perceived by the public. The phrases that come out are that preservation professionals don’t want to be known as the know people or the preservation police.

And so there’s a big pushback within the field to, in essence, deny how fundamentally centered in public policy the work of preservation is because they don’t like it. It’s the public perception issue. But I think, the fact that, the professional preservation field has been around in some way, a form in the US for half a century.

And it took me until, I did the study in 2000. I published it in 2017. it took my work to come along and actually answer this basic question of where do people work in start preservation and what do they do? Which, as a former preservation education. Professional working in universities, like how can people actually engage in educating students when they don’t even know where they’re gonna be working?

there’s so many weird things that come out of, maybe ’cause it’s such a small field that things that people really don’t know and have long assumed and it takes more people to come along and actually do this research to understand what is this thing, especially in a professional sense that we call preservation.

But also even that basic question, like how does the public perceive preservation? all of this is so ripe for understanding and research to help drive that, and there’s just not enough of it being done.

’cause in the field of transportation where my colleagues are trying desperately to orient infrastructure towards people, I’m both shocked and not surprised at the reactions you’ve received for your work. Policy and law are weighted heavily towards auto dependence. And the mirror between my field and yours is quite striking.

So when I read your preface and you’re like, the profession doesn’t wanna be people oriented, we’re focused on other things. And I was like, that tracks I guess with a lot of the stuff that we’re working on too. And so I feel like there’s a mirror there and I’m shocked that your findings and your work is such a, a lightning rod to a certain extent.

And so that, that was the focus of the presentation was essentially when I’m focusing on the book about the ways that historic preservation traditionally is often focused on things and objects, and it’s important to look at preservation in terms of how it can help people.

So it is really fascinating that basic message that the work that we do to serve preservation should benefit people because the very traditional and orthodox perspective is that people should be benefiting, preservation. In other words, people in a very basal way. People exist to save buildings and preserve buildings. And I’m flipping that around and saying buildings are here to help people, and I’m not unique in this, but it is a minority perspective in historic preservation.

I think one of the sad things, maybe that’s the best way I can put it in the preservation field, is that, when the National Trust, this was back in what, 2019 ish, did some work on what it called people-centered preservation. And I was involved very intimately with a lot of the people in the historic preservation movement, especially in the National Trust, to help work on this idea of what is people-centered preservation.

And they released kind of a, I call it a manifesto of what it means. And it was, I thought, an incredible movement forward in terms of a more people-centered field. But what ended up happening is that this idea of people-centered preservation, I would say mostly in the US ’cause abroad, this is different, ended up being condensed into diversity and inclusion.

And I have to be careful here because by making that statement, by no means at all am I implying that diversity and inclusion and preservation isn’t important. it’s, this is a very white field of all the built environment disciplines. You cannot find a whiter field.

But the problem I see is that people centeredness is about people of many identities and absolutely diversity and inclusion is a big part of it. But so are these issues I’m talking about in terms of general disconnect between the public and practicing professionals and preservation. And so the problem is that the field just stopped there and then it went backwards in a sense.

And so when you look at the orthodoxy of what’s in preservation, not a lot’s changed based on what the National Trust was coming up with. And again, I think the model that they were talking about was such an incredible way to move forward. And then it just it disappeared. It’s rather sad.

It needs to look at things like historical integrity, like authenticity from the perspective of the public, but also just a lot of language that goes into why old places benefit people and try and reorient professional practice around how its practice can benefit people rather than what is an orthodoxy is, how can historic preservation practice essentially and reduces to its basal form.

The way that preservation practice works today is how can preservation practice benefit the less than a hundred people who created or helped to develop public policy and preservation in the us. It’s a very strange perspective that. The way that preservation is practiced largely in the US is essentially to make a very small number of dead white men happy, and it doesn’t have anything to do with the public, and that’s people centered preservation.

Really, it just says, it’s a more of a grassroots approach. It’s looking at many members of the public, many identities in terms of why are places historically significant, and what is the benefits of these places, and what should we do with them, and letting that inform and balance this traditional perspective on preservation.

And he was influenced heavily by his wife, a psychologist to look at the built environment a little bit differently. And not everybody’s red young gal and I understand that and not everybody who’s a planner is like on board with that specifically, but I feel like we’ve made a step in that direction and I’m just wondering why the field of preservation is far behind when it comes to the discussion that planners and transportation planners are having.

They all, I think, have struggled with trying to legitimize that perspective. And I think planning has done a better job than architecture for it since architecture struggles with this idea of, does you know the genius of an architect’s, design aptitude, is that more important or is it looking at empirical evidence and how people who use a building should influence how the building is built?

And, that’s, that just describes the tension in architecture to a team in many cases, but in preservation more centrally. To take an environmental psychology perspective, you have to center people, or at least a person to some extent, and start, not necessarily sidelining, but saying, traditional orthodoxy preservation doctrine.

We need to push that to the side a little bit and try and learn from. People. People. How does a person perceive authenticity and the authenticity of historic places? what is that process actually What does the emotional attachment look like to older places and how is that different than to something that’s more contemporary?

And so it’s developing data that then could be analyzed, that could, theoretically, potentially even informed preservation policy as well as doctrine. you know this in planning, right? We used to be in a rational mode of planning with Moses, right? the idea of the genius of a planner came from the top down, plan something, and then implemented on the ground, and that got replaced.

with the more communicative form of planning where, okay, we need to actually have discussions with members of the public and the people who are affected. We have stakeholders. So we’re, in essence, we’re looking, we’re collecting data and information that then informs the opinions of experts. And that’s where planning has been for a long time.

We’re not quite there with preservation because preservation, we’re at a state where. The experts are still making the decisions, ultimately why places are significant, what to do with them, and then we go to the public to, in essence, have us confirm what we’ve already decided is true. That’s what public participation is in most preservation.

So the challenge is to. Look at things because preservation is so policy driven. Things like the Secretary of the Interior Standards and National Register criteria, these are actually in laws and regulations and it’s hard to get people to step away from that and replace that doctrine with something from environmental psychology, which is looking at, again, that psychological perspective about why people value other places.

And a lot of people in the policy world would say they don’t have time for that because they’ve got a stack of permits they have to approve or they have to do something in section 1 0 6 for ING comments. And this can be tangential. And this gets to, I can go really deep in this ’cause there’s sort of an intellectual side of this as well in the policy world where people working in government have brought up these issues, these people centered issues in government and have found.

Less than receptive years to this. And the one thing I can direct your audience to is there’s a gentleman by the name of Jack Elliot and he used to work in the state preservation office of Mississippi and he’s published on this. So these are peer reviewed publications he’s put out in there.

What he describes is that he tried to convince the state preservation office to look at its work in terms of public benefit and a people-centered orientation, especially in terms of looking at historical significance. And his boss essentially told him, this is direct quotes from Jack Elliot that he’s not paid to think he’s just paid to implement the statutes that the state has and what the work is that they do.

And you might think that’s isolated. But I’ve not found that. Another example of this is I used to do a lot of work with setting up conferences on these topics of people-centered preservation, and I spent a lot of time trying to get practicing professionals there, especially local historic preservation professionals working in local government.

I would find funding to get them out there and that worked out really well and we had wonderful discussions. The perspective of a professional on the ground is just so important when you’re talking about these kind of theoretical things, but every single one of those local preservation planners, when they came to the conferences I set up, when I met them, they would have, the tag from the conference.

They’d have the name on there and it was folded under underneath. And I went, what’s going on? And what they were doing is they were folding it under so that no one would know what city they were from. And I had a group of them, I said, why are you folding your name tag over? And they said, we can’t be seen as talking against what is in our preservation ordinance for our city.

So the only way we feel that we can freely share what we think are the issues with how our cities are doing preservation, we have to protect ourselves. That is a very strong thread in preservation in government, that people are very afraid to talk about the lack of this people centered orientation in the field.

And either they seek out anonymity or they try and distance themselves from the government organization that they work with. Or in the case of Jack Elliott, they retire so they can actually speak freely about their experience. But to me, that’s just one reason why you start preservation. Public policy in the US has really been frozen for a half century.

There’s a lot of people, we know what needs to change, but we’re terrified to speak up. Either we’re afraid we’re gonna lose our job, or in a lot of people think, if we speak up, we’ll lose the gains that we’ve had that if we speak up and these regulations change, then we won’t have these regulations in place to save buildings.

And so no one talks

Like what’s the threat?

All I’m expressing is the fear.

Which is palpable about. Just simply talking about these issues in the context of local, state, and federal government. I can share you with you my own personal experience on this, and that is when I was leading the historic preservation program for the city of Denver, I was talking to my manager at the time, the planning director of the program, and I brought up these ideas around people centered preservation.

and this is rather frustrating to me because I was hired specifically to bring a more contemporary perspective to the preservation program in the city. And I had a doctoral degree at that point. And it’s if you’re gonna hire someone with a doctoral degree, they’re gonna probably have ideas, right?

But I had a discussion about are there ways that the city, we could start thinking about having a more people-centered focus in terms of what we do in the preservation program? And I mentioned we’re doing some really good things around changing zoning in the city with all this public participation.

I said, it’d be great to see something happen like that with preservation. And the planning director said, he said, you know what? And it’s like this paid thing. He said, literally. You’re paid to do permit review and to approve Certificate of appropriateness applications for our local historic districts.

That’s what you’re supposed to do. And the people that you work with, that’s what they’re supposed to do. We don’t have time for this. And then you made a comment that it’s, this is too academic and it’s just like an immediate shutting down of the conversation. But it really does represent, not only in my experience, but many people working in government, how much the perception of the role that people play in local, state and federal government and preservation is checking the box, permit review and things like public engagement that goes beyond statutory obligations or even sometimes it even meets those is too time consuming.

Just the permits need to be done and to give the people who work in local preservation there. Need to focus on this because they’re often overloaded. They don’t have enough staff to do this. And so it’s two factors. One is that a lot of people working in government, public policy and preservation don’t have time to address these issues because they’re just trying to get the exigent day-to-day stuff done.

And there’s not necessarily a lot of support management for really talking or addressing many of these ideas. So it’s a frustrating experience, especially for people who work in local government, state government, federal government with preservation. I was just speaking to Stephanie Toothman and she’s spoken publicly on this about how when she worked in the National Park Service, how her work was continually stifled.

She was continually blocked around things like she was trying to do, work around revising national register criteria and just constantly blocked. There’s a lot of difficulties here, and I long ago stepped away from any hubris that I would have, that I would have any sort of influence over changing this.

all I can do is speak to it, but awareness has to start someplace. It has to absolutely start someplace.

But maybe that’s me who worked for a think tank for quite a while.

The textbooks that students read in planning programs, tend to be much more diverse. They include the social sciences, for instance, whereas in preservation education programs, there’s zero textbooks from the social sciences. They’re often zero textbooks from urban and regional planning. It’s either textbooks or.

Programs that even just directly teach from things like the National Park Services preservation briefs. And again, this just might be more of a symptom of just, it’s a very small field and planning has accrediting bodies in education. We don’t have that in historic preservation. we’ve got like the National Council of Preservation Education, but it’s just an advisory body.

Any program could call itself an historic preservation program because there’s no accreditation agency for it, but also means there’s no one looking at the curriculum of what preservation programs are teaching. And so a lot of things, in my opinion, a lot of things that should be getting taught that would be a much broader exposure to the older built environment and people are just not part of the curriculum.

And most preservation programs, I say there’s some big exceptions here. it’s like some of the Ivys are doing a really good job, let’s say Columbia University’s program. I know, Erica Rami, she’s one of the absolute leaders in this space of looking at preservation policy and the issues around it.

Really good program that other preservation programs should be emulating, but most don’t. Most don.

Like I went, my mom’s family, half of them are, Italian. And so we went back to the small village where they came from, and you can see that it’s been there since, they left. And there’s some magic there. There’s some charm in like the historicness of going back to a place where our predecessors, our ancestors were from.

And so that type of feeling, and I I glommed onto that in your discussion because I feel like there is a magic and there is something about buildings that are older that you can tell that they’re older and then you can feel their whatever it is.

So it started with, I would call it an anthropological cultural perspective. And just simply listening to and doing participant observation. How do people talk about heritage and heritage places? What is it that they’re saying that’s important? And then there’s absolutely published research out there that you can find.

There’s some in the us most of it’s international. That’s the other thing is a lot of people centered research and preservation, or heritage conservation tends to be from Europe, especially in Australia. Harder to find here in the us. So what researchers and myself included have been noticing is that most people tend to talk about over places in terms of this emotionally charged language with using words like magic and charm.

that’s an incredibly common repeated phrase, but also just the emotions, the feelings that older places instill in people. And then you go beyond that in like the research that I’ve done where people describe what that experience is when they’re in context within store building, like in it or looking at it, walking by it.

And it’s like all of these. Words come out that describe, mystery, sense of mystery. Older buildings are like a puzzle that my mind wants to pull apart and figure out how did it change over time? What happened there? So the best way I can summarize it is that part of this emotional attachment is just the, fascination of the older building and that sense of mystery and looking at it as a sense an enigma in the older built environment.

I think the closest peril I can think to planning is like when you think about the 19th century and the idea of awe or the sublime, this goes way back, right? This idea that somehow a sense of mystery or in that case a sense of danger in the natural environment. Sometimes, there were the ruins that were part of this instilled a sense that feeling, of course artists were trying to go after that with paintings.

they were onto something there. it was a public perception in a sense. It was being expressed in art. But if you go into the 20th century and into this century in environmental psychology and anthropology as well, the sense of mystery and the discovery and the layered qualities of older places.

That’s another big part of it, is that when you understand the psychological perspective of someone experiencing an older built environment, it’s like a series of layers that get unfolded and peeled back. And that what ruins it would be is if a person could experience it all at once. That layered quality.

It can be the vegetation, the fences, the way that older built environments naturally change over time and get more chaotic and complicated adds to the sense of mystery and the sense of discovery that really creates that emotional quality that bonds people to place. But the thing that I found out that is really interesting, and a few other people have pointed this out in their research as well, I, I call it a spontaneous fantasy, is that mental experience of an older building or place it catalyzes in people’s mind’s eye.

Vignettes of the past, and it’s not necessarily objectively historic vignettes of the past. Like they’ve read a book, the history of something, and then they go to this building and it’s like they’re relieving the history in their mind. It’s pre-cognitive, it’s spontaneous, and it just simply pops into people’s heads.

And it’s an emotional experience, like walking by an old building and having a memory, an artificial memory essence of what happened there. And then that emotional attachment that comes to that. And then when people keep coming back to that place, they get that same vignette from the past and that same emotional attachment and that builds up onto itself.

And when you talk to people who’ve lived in older places for like decades, this is deep. This emotional attachment to places can be really deep. And it is such the, this experience is such an important part to anybody in the star preservation field. I would say planning in general or architecture to understand how are people emotionally attached.

Places ’cause that can actually empirically inform even things like design, and interventions in the older built environment. And that’s where a lot of my work has been going in terms of, we have these tools, these social science tools, especially from environmental psychology that can help us understand how people become attached to built environments just in general.

And what a strong, empirically driven tool for design that benefits the public. So I just see, so much potential in this. And it’s not just preservation. It’s not just preservation. So I’m speaking from the edger perspective on that.

What that housing would look like and where it should go. The connection of people to housing or to place is really important in that having that discussion with people. If there’s a building going up across the street, they have this visceral reaction many people do to that. And so discussing that might be important in trying to solve some of the problems we have in urban planning at the moment, which is places aren’t necessarily allowed to change and they’re stuck in their eras here in San Francisco.

I’m in San Francisco right now. Yeah. Yeah. The discussion about, whether a building should go up is hard, and sometimes the discussion about historic preservation itself makes it hard in that some people will try to save a building or a thing or a place that they have a connection to that other people are like, I don’t get it.

Why is that laundromat important?

Like I find that really fascinating, those connections. Also, it brings me to this discussion about, like you mentioned, the conservation that’s different in a place like Japan or China, which is a more, you I mentioned more circular, cyclical. I find that fascinating as well.

’cause there’s lots of parts of the world that don’t subscribe to this, very European driven idea of history and progress as this linear thing that you’re like on a train always heading to the future. Because talking about Japan and other Asian cultures, other cultures around the world, as you mentioned, have a more cyclical version of what time is.

And so it’s always this idea that we’re coming back to where we came from. So that cycle changes this basic fundamental tenet and we’ll call it western preservation philosophy. A fundamental part of what makes an older place important, historically significant is its age. And also in a sense, it reinforces documentary value because one of the big reasons in a very expert driven sense of why we do preservation is we’re preserving a document or an older place as a literal kind of a book.

It’s evidence of itself. It’s evidence how it was created and constructed, and how people use that place. But that’s also predicated on the idea, again, in this linear progress of history, that’s something we can never return to. And it really does elevate the value of historic preservation in that sense because things that are in the past can never come, we’ll never get back around to them in a sense from the future.

But not all cultures think in those terms. there’s a researcher who was looking at how African American communities look at the significance of older places, and she really focused on this issue of time. And she was saying, it’s easy to think of American culture as something that’s obsolete, like homogenous, that we’re all the same.

We have the same ideas about history, but what Kenyata was saying is that different cultures have different ideas, even in the US about time. And for African American people, this idea time always brings with a progress. It’s not necessarily true. And so it, it just changes the idea of why things can be historically significant.

And then when you get to Japan, and other places in Asia, there’s much more of an interest traditionally in why older places get saved is not like this more Western idea. We save it because of fabric that we keep the building materials intact because say for instance, we want evidence of how things were made and constructed in the past.

there’s also a whole perspective of something called numan. There’s much more of an interest in does this historical object convey an intended meaning from the past. So it’s like intangible. We call it intangible heritage in historic preservation. And So like in Japan, you’ll have what, I’ll put this in quotes.

a thousand year old wood temples where most of the wood might be a hundred years old or 150 years old. But the way the temple is continually reconstructed and designed has very carefully been curated in the sense that it’s sending the same sort of semiotic cultural message that it did a thousand years ago.

And that’s what’s really important. So the reason why it’s important to look at different cultures is that maybe we need to step back from what we think is the right way to preserve from a professional stark preservation stance to say, there’s actually lots of different ways and maybe we should start thinking about these and considering them.

the danger here is to think, because that’s the mode we’re in right now, is to think there’s only one way to do preservation, right? And by codifying everything and rules and regulations, it makes it really simple to just do it. But then you don’t have to think about it or d defend it. You just point to the regulation.

It’s just I’m just doing what it tells me. It’s short circuits conversations. But we just need to be having many more conversations, all people, whether they’re professionals or laypeople about older places and significance and where public policy should fall into it. And also, I would say things like maybe the private sector shouldn’t be adopting public preservation policy because, this is another interesting thing is that many private foundations that say hold preservation easements or they provide funding for work like in older buildings and places in their interpretation, will include federal regulatory standards.

Like it has to be listed on the National Register of Historic Places, or all the work that happens to the building has to follow the secretary of the interior standards. Now, there’s no requirement whatsoever that a private foundation has to follow federal law on this, but they often do. And so that’s part of short circuiting the discussion that the people who actually do in organizations that have some autonomy in the space often do take advantage of it for the public benefit.

And again, I wanna be careful. I don’t think any of this is willful by any means. It just gets skipped over. We don’t think about it. We don’t talk about it. And I’ll go back to preservation education. I don’t think we’re graduating historic preservation professionals who are equipped with a sort of reflexive, inward understanding of what the field is and their role in it.

Because these questions don’t get asked enough and they should be,

it’s hard to, make change this discussion you had in the book. It got me thinking about the differences and thinking about. Heritage specifically in that linear versus the cyclical model. But I feel like it also bleeds into this discourse about planning and change. And we recently had Ben Snyder on the show and he noted in his recent book that before Euclid versus Ambler, which is the basis of zoning, most zoning in the United States, people expected change.

Yoni Applebaum and his book Stuck who recently, you know, a writer at The Atlantic and he came on the show and he was telling us about. How in the 19 hundreds and the late 18 hundreds people expected to move. They got better deals on housing. And so once a year there was a big moving day and you could just see everybody moving, not just like a few people.

They may have a more open regime versus California as more specific, but. They’re very similar. And Texas is just 20 or 30 years behind California. And the reason why is because the neighborhoods are ossifying. They’re becoming unchangeable because of the way people feel about them. And so I’m wondering, and all of this increases people’s cost of living.

It decreases their quality of life. But it also reminds me of that discussion and historic preservation about what are we preserving and why. And are we stuck? Are we stuck in these rules and regulations from Euclid on that make us stuck versus more mobile, more vibrant, more able to change with the times.

it,

we’re in this more supposedly egalitarian, participatory democracy phase of planning. But it makes it really complicated to try and understand, when you have conflicting values, whose value should surface, right? Like, how in the world do you develop a regulatory environment around conflict?

And the old fashioned way of doing this is, we pretend the conflict doesn’t exist, and then the people who have the authority just do it the way they want to conflict resolved. So I guess my response to this is that we don’t really have, I don’t know, I guess I have to be careful in saying this.

’cause it implies the people who are doing public participation work aren’t doing good work. They absolutely are. But I would also say that we need better tools for public participation, but also in data management and analyzing what comes of those processes and then. Getting some sort of guidance from whatever that process is.

it’s it almost sounds like, this is a room for ai. I don’t think that’s an easy solution, by any means. But these are things that could get better. But it has to get better if we look at planning just in general in terms of how can we get better data and use that to guide processes and really understand what that is.

And I think the low hanging fruit here is to use, you’ve got millions of people posting all over social media and the internet about what they think about the built environment. And are we using that as any kind of data? I did a, an exploration of what we call the social heritage machine, but it could be applied to planning in general.

But these are some computer scientists out of Brazil that I partnered with to research. Could we create some sort of a tool that would essentially textually mine the internet and then analyze it, use sentiment analysis to try and identify. Are there places and buildings that people are talking about that might have some sense of historical significance in the perspective of the public that’s getting missed by standard planning processes?

are there things that people are talking about that we should be focusing more on? that’s not a heritage specific thing. that’s just generally planning. There’s a lot of data out there that it’s available in different ways other than, inviting people to a meeting and gathering data from them, through some sort of public participation process.

And I’d say a lot of times those processes are not very participatory, but even when they really are, they bring the same crowd out, right? We know that’s gonna attract people that are higher income, higher education, and they have a narrower slice of the socioeconomic reality than people who aren’t gonna come, who are working multiple jobs and they have children that can’t get time off from work.

Yet those people are still absolutely sharing things on the internet that we’re not taking advantage of as planners to inform what our processes are. yeah, there’s so many different ways to look at this, but I

For white supremacy.

There’s a lot of accounts out there that are connected to this stuff that have a lot of followers and they bring people in that way of Hey, look at these beautiful places. Look at these, classic Doric columns, or whatever it might be. And then, at some point.

Switch flips and they become, fascist or white supremacist coded. And so I’m curious about that too, like what do you see in terms of the connection between the way that the political discourse is going these days and the connection to the field of historic preservation or just historic architecture generally?

This goes all the way back to, there’s an Italian architect by the name of Cam Boto that talked endlessly about this. But the interesting thing is that it was really developed really strongly in the modernist era. Us and abroad. So that need to differentiate became a mantra that modernists architects were espousing because there’s a lot of modernist architects.

It’s really fascinating. They loved older buildings. They really were preservationists James Marston Fish. He created Columbia’s historic preservation program, was a modernist. He was a modernist architect. He really loved modernism, but he also loved historic preservation. And he’s a great example in his writings, he’s very clear in saying, we need to preserve these old buildings, but we can never, ever create a new building in historical design because it would be unethical.

And that’s the modernist perspective. There’s a book by Stephen Sims, it’s called The Future of the Past, where he goes into all this modernist history and how historic preservation doctrine and policy developed in the us which reified this idea that you have to differentiate the old from the new because you cannot.

Historically replicate the past design today. And so that thread is a little less strong today, but it’s still a very prominent idea. So you’ll have preservationists if they’re operating in this mode the way they should be up, put that in quotes, looking at, say, the addition to the White House. And I mean there’s obvious things about scale and massing that you don’t need to have come from a preservation background to say no.

I dunno if that’s appropriate, but if you’re looking at just the design, preservationists are much more likely to say The issue with the design is that it is classical. And that it looks like a manufactured relic that it’s trying to accurately replicate, the columns and I guess they got rid of the pediment, but that it’s meant to look like something that was built in 1800.

That is not what you’re supposed to be doing according to orthodoxy historic preservation. So the weird way to put this, if I can put this as succinctly as possible, is that according to preservation doctrine and policy, preservationists are supposed to hate historical design while also loving it. So we save it when it’s already here, but we hate it when we want to replicate it in a new design.

And then theoretically, the reason why is because it would confuse the public. They wouldn’t know, if that addition to the White House was actually newly constructed, or it’s 250 years old. And that’s a, to me, that’s an empirical psychological question we don’t have a good answer to.

If we’re actually doing this work to differentiate the old from the new, shouldn’t we know how that should work? We don’t have any empirical basis for that. All of that was developed by a group of Italian gestalt psychologists that’s a rationalistic version of psychology who armchair, theorized the idea of differentiating the old from the new.

So we, we don’t have any good actually empirical evidence for what we’re actually doing. So I would say though, bringing it back to what you were, the original kind of framing of this about say, especially like neoclassical architecture and how it can be embraced by white supremacists, that’s absolutely much more of a factor in terms of, in essence violating preservation orthodoxy to the future.

But absolutely, it is a very strong impetus to save older buildings that embody that style. And that’s where I think the, in talking about the preservation world, where that’s an issue because. It’s much easier to present a case to save or to save. You wanna list a building on the local register in your town because you want design review protections for it.

So it can’t be demolished, can’t be changed. You can save it the way it looks today. It’s much easier to do that with a high style building because high style buildings are much less likely to change over time than say a very ordinary vernacular place that doesn’t have those high style features. But it’s changed a lot more over time and more people in that community may really love that older vernacular place much more than this neoclassical mansion.

But the Neoclassical mansion will succeed because it’s easier to preserve it under our policy orthodoxy and preservation.

So there’s some researchers and some practitioners out there like working for English Heritage that, we’ve all written on this and we’re supporting each other’s work. There’s some people out of Australia. And so we always recognize what we think is good work that serving the public and what we’re doing.

And I think the difference in my situation is in Europe it’s much more likely for there to be policy change around how the older built environment is conserved than here in the US There’s also a lot more research funding that these people are able to apply. So like when you have someone like me or Erica or Romy or even Sarah Broan, she’s an academic and she’s published academic research on this, it’s hard to find research funding on this in the us and it’s just harder to find support for what it is that you’re trying to do.

It’s much more likely, like in the case I did this presentation. Obviously the person who invited me to do the keynote was supportive of my work and thought it should be brought to a broader audience. But there were many people in the audience that did not like the message that I was sending. in addition to being told that my work was very controversial, there’s one gentleman that walked up to me and he said, if I can remember this correctly, boy, your work, is the embodiment of anarchy.

And it’s

I’m thinking of people like, Andrea Roberts, she’s done some excellent work centered on Texas freedom colonies and looking at the difficulties of preserving African American heritage. Within the regulatory environment. And what she’s finding in so many people in this situation is that you don’t have to actually work in the policy environment.

There are lots of tools outside of that, and that’s where I actually see the promise in terms of historic preservation is I think there always has to be some sort of regulatory center to it, but does it have to be nearly three quarters of the field? Probably not, but the challenge is, especially for people who are trying to find an educational path in preservation and finding jobs working in it, these pathways don’t exist.

You can be this rarefied entity like I was in the in university researcher. Whether you can actually influence much from that. I don’t know. There’s not a lot of doors to go through. Where back to your original question, where people want this kind of work done.

Where can folks find the copy? We.

If anybody wants to get ahold of me, please do. my email address is DR period, Jeremy, J-E-R-E-M-Y, dot wells, [email protected].

It’s great.