~ Pergamon

Editorial

Cities, Vol. 13, No. 6, p. iii, 1996 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. Printed in Great Britain

0264-2751/96 $15.00 + 0.00

Persevering with conservation

This issue explores the importance of conserving the historic components of cities in a number of social contexts. The papers represent discussions of India, Singapore, Ecuador and England, and rehearse a broad array of discursive and procedural issues. All were submitted independently, with the exception of that written by Strange, which was solicited when the others were close to going to press.

Any discussion of urban conservation is clouded by the claims and counterclaims that now surround the aesthetics of urban development. Modernist architects removed many older buildings from urban cores, but their creations are now, in turn, the objects of critical analysis and in some instances, renovation, with a view to their preservation (this is particularly prevalent in New York at present). At the same time, there is emerging a great deal of nostalgia for premodern forms of building, some of it bordering on the sentimental. In the US, the Congress for the New Urbanism, for example, has committed itself to the restoration of existing centers and towns. This is an unimpeachable goal, but one that has descended into the whimsical promotion of high-density residential developments that seem to echo the new townships of the Disney Corporation, or as Herbert Muschamp has described it, "archi- tecture for the Prozac age".

Central to this urge is the commodification of architecture-as-monument. American Express is subsidizing the World Monuments Fund, notably its effort to identify the world's 100 most endangered sites. In the US, the National Trust for Historic Preservation is working with the History Channel on cable television to publicise the country's 11 most endangered historic places. Many city governments have confronted the same imperative by linking historic sites to the process of urban redevelopment. The recent obituaries of James Rouse remind us how successful he was in turning obsolete neighborhoods into refurbished areas where coffee carts and cloth- ing boutiques attract visitors to a scrubbed simulac- rum of an industrial or commercial district from another era. In many of these initiatives, though, it is hard not to see the efforts to breathe life into the city in much the same way that Frankenstein tried to

reconstruct humans--a few basic components that look like the real thing but work in a clumsy and inelegant manner.

The papers in this collection touch on a number of these issues. What is of particular interest is that four of the case studies are not focused on the usual roster of American or European cities; and as Jones and Bromley observe, a significant proportion of the world's historic sites are outside the latter. Their study of Quito shows the challenges that confront renovation programs in societies with limited public or private resources. This is followed by an examina- tion of Bombay and its historic Fort district, that addresses the steps to implementing a conservation plan in a country like India. Then we have two articles that deal with Singapore (an interesting case that is alluded to in much of the literature). Sim provides a study of the changes that have occurred since the conservation effort began; Yeoh and Huang provide a complementary examination that questions how the process of creating a conservation district occurs and how the process of inclusion and exclusion operates.

The issue closes with two papers that both, coinci- dentially, deal with the UK. The first is a procedural study that addresses Yeoh and Huang's concerns, asking whether residents can effectively participate in the process of determining which buildings, and which areas, should be designated for conservation and how much should be spent on the process? The concluding article reviews some of the theoretical questions that are being applied to this issue in terms of regime and regulation theory.

In all these cases, we see valuable discussions. Together, they indicate that the move to retain historic components of any city is part of the wider political economy of urban change, and subject to the same tensions as the construction of a new traffic plan or suburban neighborhood. Moreover, recent efforts to introduce concepts of sustainability into urban planning are not easily inserted into existing conservation proposals. Clearly, wider debate is emerging in this field.

Andrew Kirby

n l