Beyond Preservation: Using Public History to Revitalize Inner Cities by Andrew Hurley (review)

In Beyond Preservation, Andrew Hurley makes the case that public history and public archaeology have untapped potential to revitalize urban neighborhoods. To counteract the tendency of traditional historic preservation strategies to destabilize existing inner-city populations, Hurley advances an alternative grass-roots public history model based on his own involvement in community-university partnerships in St. Louis. This model is designed to draw the participation of a wider cross-section of residents in planning processes that use history to attract investment, establish neighborhood identity, and stabilize population.

Hurley provides a comprehensive background for his critique of historic preservation’s limitations. In the years after World War II, preservation emerged as an attractive alternative to urban renewal. As an urban revitalization strategy, historic preservation often proved successful, but Hurley contends that an increasing propensity to frame this success in terms of rising property values displaced lower income residents. Furthermore, historic preservation has the tendency to freeze historical focus on the illustrious beginnings of neighborhoods, effacing long periods of community history from view. Hurley contrasts these exclusivist tendencies with the democratic trends within the historical profession that spurred the birth of public history, an effort to give voice to disenfranchised populations and created a “shared authority” between professionals and the public.

The core of Beyond Preservation centers on case studies that attempt to meld the best of these two worlds. In three separate projects, academics from Community History Research and Design Services (CHRDS) (affiliated with the University of Missouri-St. Louis) collaborated with neighborhood activists in North St. Louis neighborhoods who hoped to use historic preservation to attract investment and new homeowners without displacing current residents. Project leaders encouraged community members to view the built environment as a complex accretion of layers of social and cultural history. Tools such as oral history and public archaeology allowed residents to craft historical narratives that supported the neighborhood identity they hoped to cultivate in the future. Through these narratives, residents were able to take ownership of the community planning process.

While widespread citizen engagement and consensus are at the heart of Hurley’s vision for public history projects, he acknowledges the practical difficulties of drawing non-traditional stakeholders into the research and planning process. Hurley is honest about both the about successes and shortcomings of the St. Louis projects, and the latter chapters of the book are devoted to the challenges and opportunities faced in such efforts: getting the community behind public-history projects, integrating the natural environment into preservation efforts, and efforts to bridge the gap between community and university participants.

Beyond Preservation has a clear precedent in Dolores Hayden’s seminal book The Power of Place, based on Hayden’s own public history projects in Los Angeles in the 1990’s. The prose is clear and well-organized, and Hurley provides a wealth of examples of projects that have attempted to make history a dynamic and effective tool for planning and redevelopment, including not only The Power of Place, but Place Matters in New York City, Archaeology in Annapolis, the Historic Savannah Foundation, and host of others across the United States.

The first two chapters—a primer on the historic preservation movement and the development of public history—would make excellent reading in public history or preservation classes. Because of its emphasis on practical application, the book also reaches out the educated layperson. Importantly, Hurley devotes a section of the book to addressing the crucial conundrum of preservation without displacement, providing concrete strategies, steps of action, and examples of successful programs that have facilitated the maintenance of diverse populations in historic neighborhoods. Though Hurley’s critique of historic preservation efforts as “history for profit” has some validity, he overstates the point when he claims that historic neighborhoods have failed to create communities. Furthermore, in many cases—some of which he cites—small groups of activists have employed historic preservation as a tool to save their neighborhood from imminent threat of wholesale destruction. In...