This week on Talking Headays, Jeremy Wells discusses 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.
Scroll past the audio player below for a partial edited transcript of the episode — or click here for a full, AI-generated (and typo-ridden) readout.
Jeff Wood: I also have another question about the people orientation direction that you took. And I wanna say it delicately, because it's not an insult to you necessarily, but your preface in the book is strange to me because 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 want to 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.
Jeremy Wells: I recently did a presentation at a statewide preservation conference a couple weeks ago, and the person that was introducing me for it introduced me as a very "controversial figure" in the field, specifically because I was focusing on being people centered.
And so 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 — because 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.
Jeff Wood: What does it look like? What does the model look like?
Jeremy Wells: Things like recognizing the significance about places. If you're gonna establish that, you need to actually go out and talk to the people who live in these places who are associated with these places, and that needs to be balanced with traditional expertise of historians and architectural historians to figure out why places are historically significant.
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.
