Why preservation matters

Every day, millions of people enter old buildings, pass monuments, and gaze at landscapes unaware that these acts are only possible thanks to the preservation movement. As we approach the October 2016 anniversary of the United States National Historic Preservation Act, historian Max Page offers a thoughtful assessment of the movement’s past and charts a path toward a more progressive future.

Page argues that if preservation is to play a central role in building more-just communities, it must transform itself to stand against gentrification, work with the environmental sustainability movement, and challenge societies to confront their pasts. Touching on the history of the preservation movement in the US and the UK, Page also ranges the world searching for inspiration about how to rejuvenate historic preservation for the next fifty years. This illuminating work will be widely read by urban planners, historians, and anyone with a stake in the past.

Max Page is a professor of architecture and history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and author of The Creative Destruction of Manhattan, 1900–1940, winner of the Spiro Kristof Award from the Society of Architectural Historians. He lives in Amherst, MA.