Conservation as Preservation or as Heritage: Two Paradigms and Two Answers

Conservation as Preservation or as Heritage: Two Paradigms and Two Answers, G.J. Ashworth

The conservation of the built environment is a practical activity conducted at the local level as an integral place management for collective, public goals

Preservation       Heritage
              Objectives
              Resources
              Selection criteria
             Interpreted Product
             Strategy

• Preservation: protection from harm. Spectacular>mundane, large>small, beautiful>ugly, unusual>commonplace
• created legal frameworks and public financial subsidy systems enforced by well-established state agencies in most countries and internationally supported by private organizations and pressure groups 
• heritage, anything inherited from the past, commodification process: select, package, and interpret 
• history, recording of selective aspects of the past
• memory, collective and individual memories of the past
• relics, survivals from the past in the present, artefacts, buildings, sites
•  heritage, terminology, techniques, and philosophies drawn from marketing science to public sector, nonprofit, organizations with collective goals, game anywhere can play and everywhere probably will
•  conservation, came out of preservation "not only but also"

Challenge

• to traditional preservation approach
• demand: past is consumed for political, social, psychological, or economic needs
• supply: the providers of historic resources are dependent on consumer demands for financial, political, and ethical support

 “From the demand side, the past is being consumed in an increasing variety of ways, for the satisfaction of increasingly strongly-felt needs, whether political, social, psychological or economic. In short, more and more people want the past now in more and more different ways that owe nothing to the traditional preservational premises. Secondly, and from the supply side, the providers of historic resources are becoming increasingly dependent on these consumer demands for their financial, political and ethical support.” (94)


“This dominant traditional preservation paradigm is inherently incapable of either accommodating or rejecting these more recent imperatives.”  

• dominant intellectual elites 
• characteristics of a crusade
• charismatic prophets
• moral righteousness unchallenged among believers
• simplistic division of good preservationists and evil developers
• rescue operation heroically and unselfishly salvaging some small portion of the architectural riches which were and still are being destroyed at an alarming rate 
• our cities should provide visible clues to where we have been and where we are going 
• historic resources are assumed to be in short supply 
• preserve OR not

NO

• one subsidy for restoration
• a steady state maintenance expenditure 
• places are NOT locked in an inescapable resource bound heritage 

Lowell, MA, Bradford, Yorkshire

•  revitalize with industrial archaeology, social history, Victorian literature
• everywhere has a unique, flexible, and infinitely commodifiable past

 Jane Austen's Bath, Mozart's Salzburg, Michaelangelo's Florence

• ephemeral development options created by a fickle, fashion-prone demand
•  

Lincoln's cabin, Ottawa Rideau Chapel, Louis Sullivan's Chicago Stock Exchange trading floor, museum ships, the routine shifting of North American preserved buildings out of the path of developments

• architecture, art history specialists over urban development or management

 Survival

• natural hazards
• durability of materials
• fortunes of war
• pressures for economic development and social conservatism

 York Minster

• replacement of missing or defective parts 

Venetian palazzi, Disney World
Parthenon, Nashville
Anne Hathaway's Cottage in Victoria
Castell Coch, Wales