Beyond Preservation: Using Public History to Revitalize Inner Cities

5. Making a Place for Nature: Preserving Urban Environments

5  Making a Place for Nature Preserving Urban Environments H istoric preservation in cities has focused almost exclusively on the restoration and interpretation of built structures. Even as preservation has emerged as a community-revitalization strategy and, in the best scenarios, incorporated vernacular elements of the urban landscape and diverse interpretive perspectives, this bias has remained. On the face of it, the scant attention devoted to natural landscape elements by historic preservationists is unsurprising. Nature is rarely considered a major force in the development of cities. Instead, it represents that which was eviscerated as the historical process unfolded. Yet many of the challenges facing inner-city communities pertain directly to the way people interact with their natural surroundings—the air they breathe, the water they drink, the soil on which they play, the plants and animals they encounter. Effectively integrating the natural and built environment in a coherent vision of healthy and satisfying communities may well constitute the next frontier in urban historic preservation . Wedded to good public history, it may also hold the key to assuring a sustainable relationship between the urban core and the surrounding metropolis. The Trajectory of Two Preservation Movements For many years the preservation of natural areas and the preservation of built environments proceeded along parallel tracks, each guided by distinct laws, constituencies, and agendas. Certainly, since World War II, historic preser- MAKING A PLACE FOR NATURE 121 vationists have concentrated their activities in cities and looked to cultural attributes to measure the worthiness of standing structures. Nature conservationists , on the other hand, increasingly adopted scientifically based criteria to protect endangered species and their habitats in less populated areas. Within cities, environmentalists focused their attention on threats to human health, particularly air and water pollution.1 On occasion, environmentalists and historic preservationists joined forces to stop offensive development projects that interfered with their goals—for instance, the construction of new highways—but the basis of these alliances tended to be strategic rather than philosophical.2 As long as environmentalists saw the object of preservation as the exclusion of people from nature and the maintenance of nature in a state of pure wilderness, there was little likelihood of a unified perspective on landscape conservation. As the twentieth century drew to a close, however, new ways of thinking about place began to erode the boundary between the two preservation approaches and point to an overarching rationale for protecting both natural and cultural assets. Indeed, the same intellectual currents that brought the accomplishments and struggles of more social groups within the orbit of historic preservation made it possible to acknowledge and appreciate the role of natural forces in shaping the character of places. Reading landscapes as layered systems of economic and social production logically took any analysis of place back to the soils, waterways, minerals, flora, and fauna initially manipulated by humans for their sustenance and growth.3 Further intellectual incentive for a more comprehensive approach to landscape preservation came from a group of environmental historians who shattered the false dichotomy between nature and artifice by exposing the human imprint on settings usually perceived as “natural.” Scholars such as William Cronon, Stephen Pyne, Anne Spirn, and Mark Spence demonstrated that some of the most cherished national examples of natural beauty—including the Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls, and Yellowstone Park—were all products, at least in part, of human design.4 At the same time, nonhuman forces such as wind patterns, geological formations, and hydrology were shown to have played critical roles in the shaping of spaces widely perceived as the epitome of artifice—for instance, factory complexes and urban neighborhoods.5 Finally, a greater appreciation of nature’s inherent dynamism and the corresponding demise of an equilibrium model of ecological succession forced yet another point of congruence between the two preservation movements. Once one concedes that nature never exists in a steady state, restoration requires the selection of a date or historical period to serve as a benchmark. Ecological preservation thus becomes de facto historic preservation.6 122 CHAPTER 5 As important as these theoretical breakthroughs were, it was a set of practical considerations that made environmentalists and historic preservationists receptive to the idea of moving beyond strategic alliances to a more holistic and coordinated set of conservation principles and practices. A heightened appreciation of contexts—in the case of environmentalism, habitats and ecosystems instead of individual species, and in...