4.0 HPSR 12-08-2005 - Laserfiche WebLink

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~+~~ '~/g/~5 Emerging Issues in the Values of Preservation Minnesota Preservation Conference Duluth, Minnesota September 15, 2005 Thank you. I am very pleased to be invited back to the Minnesota preservation conference. I remember well the conference, perhaps ten years ago, in Stillwater. Thanks for having me again. An understanding of the values of historic preservation continues to grow. The part of that growing understanding that I'm going to talk about today is preservation's wider role as the central strategy in any sustainable development context. I'm also going to usually use the phrase "heritage conservation" rather than "historic preservation" as I'm come to agree with most of the rest of the world that it is a more descriptive phrase. Last fall I was in Barcelona to attend the World Urban Forum. The World Urban Forum is UN Habitat's biennial gathering of people from around the world who are dealing with issues of cities. In Barcelona there were 5000 people from 150 or so countries. During the week there were perhaps 300 sessions -workshops, plenary addresses, panel discussions -and, of course, thousands of less formal interactions. Not surprisingly, the most common phrase coming out of those sessions was sustainable development. But you know what the second most common phrase was? heritage conservation. There were perhaps a dozen or so sessions specifically about heritage conservation, so hearing the phrase there was no surprise. But heritage conservation permeated the discussions in sessions that on the surface weren't about historic preservation at all -sessions about economic competitiveness, job creation, housing, public private partnerships and social cohesion. Much of the world has begun to recognize the interrelationship and the interdependency between sustainable development and heritage conservation.. Much of the world, but much less so in the United States. I'm not so sure we've really learned those lessons in America, or at least we have not yet broadly connected the dots. Far too many advocates in the US far too narrowly define what constitutes sustainable development. Let me give you an example. Last September in Boulder, Colorado, a homeowner in a local historic district made an application to paint the window sashes and trim and approval. was given that day. Two weeks later the Landmarks Commission learned that the historic windows had all been removed - a clear violation of the local ordinance -and had been replaced with new windows. This was done, by the way, by contractor who claims to specialize in "ecologically sound materials and methods" and bills himself as "Boulder's greenest contractor."