Heritage amid an urban crisis: Historic preservation in Cleveland,Ohio's Slavic Village neighborhood

Cleveland, Ohio's Slavic Village is a shrinking neighborhood within a shrinking city that, in recent years, garnered national attention as an epicenter of the foreclosure crisis. High vacancy rates, deferred maintenance, vandalism, and low market-values present challenges to neighborhood leaders and policymakers. While demolition has dominated policy discourses in shrinking cities, Slavic Village's built environment is the tangible manifestation of the community's rich working-class and immigrant heritage. Thus, this research asks: In an era of urban shrinkage, what role do heritage and historic preservation play in stabilizing or revitalizing shrinking neighborhoods? Drawing on a qualitative case study of Slavic Village, the findings show that neighborhood leaders value heritage, yet historic fabric is in peril as traditional preservation regulations and incentives are insufficient given the scale of devastation. For historic preservation to retain relevance in places like Slavic Village, the profession needs to consider new, creative, even radical approaches that respond to the challenges of urban shrinkage.     

The sustainability cycle of historic houses and cultural memory: Controversy between historic preservation and heritage conservation

Historic preservation and heritage conservation are two mainstream concepts related to the sustainability and renewal of historic houses. With the aim of enhancing the sustainability of historic houses, this article criticizes the view of historic preservation that insists on preserving historic houses with their old appearances, which does not fully develop their sustainability. In contrast, the article provides support for the view of heritage conservation that aims to promote the sustainability of historic houses and related legislation. In the second and third parts, this article examines the theoretical origin of historic preservation, which emphasizes and summarizes the one-way protection of cultural memory via historic houses. In the fourth part, the article turns to heritage conservation, highlights the sustainable cycle between historic houses and cultural memory, and underlines the advantages of this sustainable cycle. In the fifth part, this article presents a sustainable approach to heritage conservation and related legal safeguards by taking the renewal of historic houses in China's Bagua Village (or “Eight Diagrams Village”) as an example. In the last part, this paper summarizes the theoretical value, practical value and limitations of this article. The findings can facilitate the UN's sustainable development of social inclusion, economic growth, and environmental protection to promote the heritage legislation and policy of present and future generations.     

The opportunities and tensions of historic preservation and transit oriented development (TOD)

The article examines two research questions concerning historic preservation and TOD. First, what are the opportunities for and challenges to developing TODs in historic areas. Transit locations are often located in older historic areas and a restored or adaptively reused historic building can be an asset to a TOD because of the amenity it affords and its preservation of the linkage to the history of a place. There are other opportunities, such as the TOD capitalizing on an historic area's attractive and unique architectural style. At the same time, there may be tensions because as a TOD aims to maximize density near transit, pressure may mount to demolish lower density historic buildings.Second, what tools have been useful to preservationists, planners, developers, and communities for preserving historic buildings in TOD locations? Case studies of success and failure to combine historic preservation and TOD in six communities nationally in the United States showed that while the synthesis can be challenging it is feasible and results in distinctive and attractive developments. A key strategy included combining the federal historic tax credit and other subsidies. We observed other useful approaches, such as engaging stakeholders and place-making via local art and other means. Varying local conditions, however, argue against one set approach.     

Hitting Below the Bible Belt: The Development of the Gay Rights Movement in Atlanta

Abstract: This study focuses on the gay and lesbian rights movement in America's most conservative region, the South, and its major urban center, Atlanta. Gays and lesbians benefited from a changing political opportunity structure as they overcame severe pressures to develop their own neighborhoods, build a wide range of organizations, and become an important electoral bloc. The movement built upon the city's civil rights legacy and benefited from the dissipation of it opponents, but it has not posed a major threat to what has been labeled Atlanta's regime.     

Changing intra-metropolitan accessibility in the U.S.: Evidence from Atlanta

The U.S. federal government appears committed to the idea of performance measurement. The Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (1991), provides an opportunity to change the focus of metropolitan transportation planning and policy from fostering mobility (more travel) increasing accessibility (greater potential for desired interaction), which is widely viewed as a desirable objective among planners and the general public. This paper does three things: (1) defines the concept and clarifies questions of measurement, (2) reviews the literature to identify importat issues associated with changing accessibility, including accessibility's relationship to land use and value, poverty and unemployment, race, energy use and air pollution, (3) reports results from a case study of change in gravity-accessibility to employment by automobile in Atlanta, between 1980 and 1990.Other authors have argued that accessibility has been increasing over time, as well as becoming more homogenous in U.S. metropolitan areas. Together these developments are thought to have reduced its policy importance. This case study illustrates that this was not entirely the case in Atlanta in the late 1980s. Overall accessibility declined at the end of the decade, rather than continuing its steady increase, and its influence on residential density at the tract level (the access-density gradient) also changed direction. However, accessibility's explanatory power did decline from 1980 to 1900 in Atlanta, as expected. It seems likely therefore that accessibility will continue to be valuable as an indicator of metropolitan transportation systems' performance, as well as allowing planners to better anticipate change and to be more aware of its consequences.     

The aesthetics of city‐scale preservation policy in Beijing

Chinese cities today represent a historically important case of the relation between city‐scale preservation policy and urban design, and the role they play in the rapid transformation of urban environments. This article reviews Beijing’s preservation and urban design policies as they existed in 1990, and as they evolved and responded over the following fifteen years of radical change. Beijing’s master plan in the 1990s ambitiously attempted to define the preservation‐worthy image of the entire old city, but did so in narrowly picturesque terms. The practice of ‘protecting’ designated historic structures by clearing the space around them, and the dependence on a totalizing view‐from‐on‐high to define Beijing’s overall characteristic form (as opposed to an experience of the city from its myriad public and private spaces), produced a city‐wide preservation policy that was particularly handicapped in its ability to accommodate change.     

Issue Title Page

For the celebration of Berlin's 750th anniversary in 1987, only two years before the unexpected fall of the Berlin Wall, the socialist regime in the German Democratic Republic remodeled some of the long-despised late-19th-century tenement neighborhoods and fitted them out with the insignia of historic everyday life. Simultaneously, it approved the construction of a number of representative architectural ensembles using different historic styles.This paper analyzes the evolution of this new historic city in the context of two particular locations, the neo-historical development Nikolaiviertel and the tenement district Prenzlauer Berg. It argues that the construction of the historic city was, on the one hand, an intellectual endeavor within a cultural context that cut across political and ideological boundaries and, on the other hand, the strategy of a regime that found itself under increasing economic and political pressure. It further argues that in designing the historic city East German architects, planners, and politicians adapted an international cultural development within the narrow framework of the socialist state and anticipated many aspects of urban planning that emerged after German reunification. Promoting an unspecific notion of “the past,” they initiated a renaissance of once neglected neighborhoods, which after reunification became prime locations for upmarket housing and retail. Construction policy before and after reunification therefore has to be seen as a continuous development, despite the fact that after the end of the socialist regime planners and architects from the former East were largely excluded from the decision-making process. Despite the different political and economic system in the GDR, East Berlin design politics during the 1980s paralleled approaches in the West, where real and imagined urban history was increasingly commodified and marketed to local elites and tourists.     

Review Correspondence

Like other historic capital cities, Rome faces problems of crowding, traffic congestion, and conflicts between values of historic preservation and contemporary space needs. A new general plan responds to these problems by proposing a radical restructuring of the city's form along with a new linear city three miles to the east of the existing center. The new center will have excellent communications and modern efficient space and will be linked to the historic city by means of rapid transit and freeway routes. Activities will be distributed in the old and new centers so that they will complement each other.

New legal and administrative devices have been developed by the city planning office in Rome to implement the scheme. Planners must overcome the inertia of historic tradition and vested interest. It is still too early to say whether the new plan will be successful, but recent traffic improvements and capital investments provide grounds for restrained optimism.     

Redeveloping Public Housing

The debate surrounding recent substantial changes in U.S. public housing policies and the emergence of a consensus favoring broader income mixing overlooks important historic lessons. From the 1950s through the 1970s, frequently in response to local business-led political coalitions, urban renewal programs forcibly displaced poor minority people without allowing their meaningful participation in redevelopment planning, without allowing their adequate compensation, without sufficient replacement housing, and without the possibility of their returning to the redeveloped area. These projects simultaneously destroyed indigenous social communities as they frequently replaced existing residents with much higher income households. More recently during the 1990s, reconstruction of the 1,195-unit Tech-wood and Clark Howell public housing developments in Atlanta, Georgia, as the 900-unit Centennial Place mixed-income community, evolving federal housing policies and funding, and insufficient federal oversight contributed to the Atlanta political regime and the Atlanta Housing Authority producing markedly similar results. National research to measure the representativeness of this case is needed, as is legislation mandating asset retention, meaningful resident participation in redevelopment planning, and relocation and replacement housing.     

POLICY REVIEW - Regime Shifts in Dutch Housing Policy

Since the early 1980s many Western governments have been faced with the challenge of dismantling their unwieldy social policy systems. In the Netherlands, housing policies were one of the first fields to undergo the shift from the previous patterns of direct 'governmental' intervention to the new regimes of 'governance'. The social and political aspirations of housing policy were not put aside however. Instead, they are now being pursued by establishing rules which determine the relations between social and governmental actors in another way (the new regime of 'order' rules). The author analyses the emergence of the rules of the new regime and discusses some of the institutional and distributive implications.     

New Trajectories in Historic Preservation: The Rise of Built‐Heritage Protection in Israel

Current research into Israeli historic preservation policy tends to focus on the ideological and socioeconomic factors that mold preservation of the built heritage. However, few attempts have been made to measure preservation policy, to inquire whether it is a growing phenomenon, or to clearly identify economic and political factors which may have an impact on its assimilation in the planners’ toolkit. To remedy that, this article studies preservation policies in Israel by looking at hundreds of development plans inclusive of heritage‐protection mechanisms. A learning curve is identified indicating how gradually more plans were introduced through the years by localities and especially by major Israeli cities. The increase in preservation efforts clearly suggests that fiscal constraints, contested pasts, and existing heritage dissonances have not prevented continuous preservation efforts. These efforts can be explained by looking at economic boons in the form of statutory incentives, the location of protected historic properties, and the types of heritage being protected.     

国家公园体制下风景名胜区的价值与发展路径

改革开放40余年,中国的自然保护地体系发展迅速,除风景名胜区外,还先后设立了自然保护区等14类保护地,实际上形成了中国的自然保护地体系。但由于各类保护地在空间和权责上的重叠,国家决定建立国家公园体制并对各类保护地进行重组。在此背景下,比照世界遗产、国家公园等国际上的保护地体系建设经验,梳理了中国风景名胜价值演进和利用发展的3个阶段,解说了世界遗产与中国风景名胜资源的对应关系。并在目前风景名胜区体系整体保留的情况下,尝试借鉴世界遗产价值评估对中国国家公园体系的分类分级进行完善,识别风景名胜区强调自然和文化相结合的价值和特色,指明国家公园体制下的风景名胜区保护资源并带动地区发展的潜力与路径。     

Conflicting élites and changing values: designing two historic districts in downtown Seattle, 1958–73

Seattle's Pioneer Square and Pike Place Market have maintained their reputation as symbolic urban places in the city and as exemplary historic districts in the United States. This paper illuminates the emergence of these two historic districts from the standpoint of the conflict between the two élite camps, as well as their motivations in shaping downtown urban forms during the 1960s. The conflict occurred as part of a transition from the time when business leaders' economic values fuelled a CBD-centred promotion, through the point where planning for downtown fringe districts came to incorporate art and design professionals' cultural values. The local élites played their distinctive roles in creating the two historic districts in downtown Seattle, sometimes in line with the nationwide trends and sometimes apart from them. The making of the two historic districts was eventually realized as a part of federally funded urban renewal and demonstration programmes, which the business élite initially ushered in and the cultural élite later tailored to fit its downtown values. While the shift in perspective did yield, as many have recalled, moments of a 'people's victory against the establishment' and 'preservation virtues against redevelopment harms' in downtown planning, this paper suggests that the shift involved local planning circumstances that were too complex to be characterized in such dualistic terms.     

REVITALIZING MINORITY COMMERCIAL AREAS THROUGH COMMERCIAL HISTORIC DISTRICT DESIGNATION: A Case Study of Atlanta,Georgia

ABSTRACT: Historic preservation is one way cities can stimulate the economies of lagging or distressed areas. Owners of commercial properties in historic districts enjoy federal and local tax incentives, grants, and loans, as well as protection of external facades in the district. If historic district designation is associated with price effects, there should be a significant price differential between commercial properties in designated and nondesignated areas. This paper reviews the extent to which designation makes a difference in revitalizing commercial investment in a minority commercial district in Atlanta, Georgia. Compared to a nondesignated commercial area, historic district designation appears to be effective in revitalizing commercial properties in terms of improving property values and, by inference, commercial activity.     

历史保护与生态节能双重视野下的上海里弄更新改造

历史保护与生态节能相结合的上海里弄更新改造,是基于传统生态元素及其现代节能技术介入展开,提出在继承原有里弄模式与构成基础上,充分尊重可持续观念,主张在改造设计的过程中全面贯彻历史保护与生态节能并进的现代理念。     

Measuring Urban Design: Metrics for Livable Places,by Reid Ewing and Otto Clemente

In this article I examine the relationship between post-industrial growth and planning in three great cities: New York, Paris, and London. Each has taken a different approach to its post-industrial transformation. New York's approach, the Manhattan strategy of intensive development, emphasizes growth in and around the central business district. The Parisian approach, the axes strategy of extensive development, spreads growth through the larger region. London's approach, containment by zoning, stresses a balance between commercial growth and the preservation of neighborhoods and green space. I analyze each strategy as a product of a city's governmental structure, its control over local markets, and its developmental conditions. Each strategy reflects the historic practices of its respective city and entails its own costs and benefits.     

台湾旧城保护与更新城市设计策略初探

针对台湾在历史建筑、街区的保存维护中形成的注重再发展思维，分析了台湾地区在保存维护历史建筑、街区过程中形成的一些有益的、成功的策略，以促进大陆地区历史建筑、街区的保护。     

Urban aesthetics and the discovery of the urban fabric in turn‐of‐the‐century Germany

Approaches to planning that developed in the later nineteenth century in Germany (and in Europe generally) were challenged on aesthetic grounds at the end of the century by Camillo Sitte and others. By the turn of the century, practitioners of planning had embraced Sitte's views on a number of matters. Among the changes that occurred were an end to the disencumbering of monumental buildings and a greatly expanded interest in historic preservation. This was not simply a matter of aesthetics gaining more influence over planning practice, however. Sitte's desire to develop systematically the aesthetic dimension of planning was shared by earlier theorists, notably Hermann Maertens, who endorsed many of the practices Sitte rejected. Ultimately, the compatibility of the new aesthetics with more practical needs was crucial to its acceptance. The new interest in historical models reflected an understanding of urban form that enabled planners to reconcile their aesthetic goals with other needs.     

Urban conservation policy and the preservation of historical and cultural heritage: The case of Singapore

In cities experiencing rapid economic growth, historic districts with rich cultural heritage are often demolished and replaced by modern high-rise buildings. This article shows the success of Singapore's urban conservation policy in preserving its historic districts in the face of a fast expanding economy and rapid urban development. A survey in the conservation areas shows that the policy has succeeded in preserving the historic old shophouses to a large extent. An analysis of the use of shophouses shows that the policy has also succeeded in retaining the activities which reflect the community life in the core areas of Chinatown, Kampong Glam and Little India. This is because the policy allows for the operation of market forces which makes preservation and restoration of the old shophouses viable.     

Opportunities and Constraints on Mayoral Behavior: A Historical‐Institutional Approach

Abstract A theoretical perspective that situates mayoral behavior within broader patterns of partisan competition is asserted here as a more satisfying explanatory framework for mayoral leadership than rival theories that focus on personality. Behavior is structured by the mayor's relationship toward the regime in power. Mayors are either affiliated or independent of the regime, and regimes are either strong or weak. Four leadership postures result, and case studies are used to demonstrate the robustness of the approach. Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley (1954–76) practiced reconstructive politics by modernizing the city's Democrat political machine. Atlanta mayor Andrew Young (1982–90) practiced the politics of articulation by upholding the commitments of the city's African‐American electoral coalition. New York City mayor David Dinkins (1990–93) practiced disjunctive politics when the liberal order to which he was faithful suffered a crisis of legitimacy. Finally, Cleveland mayor Dennis Kucinich (1977–79) practiced preemptive politics by challenging the robust regime of party regulars and bankers in his city with little success.