 Good afternoon. I'm very honored at the invitation and delighted to be with you and already learned a great deal about the minority heritage, minority faith buildings and your efforts to document and interpret and conserve them. I think I may have been invited to represent a minority. I think I'm the only American. I'm being a white male professional Protestant. I'm very, very rarely in the position of being a minority so I will try to take the mantle seriously. We have a great deal to learn generally in the US from especially what happens in England and the UK but internationally in general so this is a great learning opportunity for me. Hopefully I'll be able to tell you a few things about how we have been approaching in two different but related paths. These problems of dealing with culturally rich but contested buildings, particularly in big urban places and particularly those buildings whose cultural significance is both backward looking in the sense of being historically significant but also very much forward looking in the social and societal significance of historic sacred places as we typically call them in the US. So Linda's invitation started with asking me to talk about some work that I've been involved in going back 15 or so years at the Getty Conservation Institute about as turned at that time the values and benefits of heritage conservation. And this was a body of work that was meant to, it wasn't to invent any new ways of thinking about heritage conservation. It was really trying to organize and stimulate more conversation and more reflection honestly among people in the heritage conservation field. Not so much about advocacy about convincing others to do heritage conservation but understanding the decisions that get made and how the decisions get made. And so the very important part of this work was in trying to explore and parse the different kinds of values that attach to any particular kind of decision about a building or a landscape or an urban place. And we're very much practical kinds of matters. There is going back centuries of course a great deal of history and theory about the concepts of value and how they are different depending on which kind of intellectual tradition, which kind of cultural tradition one finds oneself embedded within. We struggled at the Getty to make the work both theoretically robust partly by inviting lots of people from lots of different disciplines to contribute to understanding value and significance as it attached to heritage decisions. But we also meant to constantly be in dialogue with practice which is to say the actual work of making decisions that are interventions in fabric and also interventions in social networks and social significance of places. So the context of this whole project that the Getty launched in the late 90s and in various ways have continued to the present day is to connect heritage conservation more robustly and more openly to the issues of contemporary society. And to make conservation less of an expert discourse, it was more or less enclosed and inward looking and more of an applied social practice and connected to unabashedly the issues that are most urgent today and will be most urgent in the future. And that of course is a struggle to have it both ways and I think you'll see, you'll hear me openly still struggling with that as I talk about some of the work, the practical work that I do back in the U.S. So one of the, one of my efforts to try to bring this theoretical discourse about values and values based conservation back to the issue of not just minority faith buildings but from the first instance historic sacred places is to use, often use in courses that I teach or lectures that I give historic sacred places as the best examples of conflicts between different kinds of values and how this notion of multiple conflicting simultaneous valuation discourses frames the decisions that we make or that have to be made of our religious historic buildings. How many of you have been to New York? That's always an easy question. So it seems like the room is awake with being there once a little coffee in it behind you. How many of you have been to Philadelphia by the way? Great. Okay. So St. Paul's Chapel in New York is lower Manhattan on Broadway. It's the oldest religious building in Manhattan. This wonderful photograph of the west side shows the churchyard and the 1766 edifice. Inside it's a relatively typical Episcopal church from the colonial era. It has a couple of other kinds of values in addition to its architectural and historic value. In other words, it's not just old and beautiful. It's also meaningful in terms of American patriotism. This is the pew in which George Washington, our founding father, worshiped just after he was inaugurated as our first president. It has, if you will, landscape and ecological and environmental value in the churchyard. It is a rare remainder of colonial landscape in lower Manhattan. And it's also a place of active worship. It's still an active chapel of the Episcopal Church, Episcopal Diocese in New York. It also, and this is where the value of this place as a case in understanding conflict and interpretation, it took on a very new meaning that changed the building quite dramatically in both use and fabric after 9-11. This is right next to where the World Trade Center were, World Trade Center towers. It was miraculously undamaged in 9-11, but it was used because it was undamaged right next door as a kind of relief center, a rest center for the rescue workers. As the rescue workers took their rest, they had slept on the pews of the church, which you see here, and the tools on their belts damaged the pews. Now, as any good conservationist would tell you, we have to value that new layer of evidence. But it created a lot of conflicts in how the interior of the church was designed and redesigned, and also the new functions that the church, the chapel had acquired, effectively as a museum and a shrine related directly to 9-11. So it really is kind of happenstance that it happened to be the oldest church in Manhattan, but this new layer of value, which is not just sort of allowed, but then later embraced. And I think arguably there have been lots of conflicts we can talk about about changing the nature of the worship and the arrangement of the worship in order to accommodate this kind of museum and archival use of saving these indelible marks on 9-11, which of course is an incredibly significant cultural narrative, although very, very recent. On another note, it's a little bit closer and much shorter to the issue of minority faith buildings. This is another church, not far from St. Paul's but St. Augustine's, that gets to what I think is really the important issue when it comes to minority faith buildings, certainly in New York and Philadelphia. And that's African-American narratives and making visible the more and more manifestations of racism, historical racism, and connecting that to the problems that we continue to encounter every day, not so much in the sanctuaries of religious worship as St. Augustine's was. It was an Episcopal chapel, later became an independent church, and these are just sort of almost generic documentary photographs in the 30s. But if you notice on this drawing from several decades ago, it's the only church in New York that retains what were long called slave galleries, which were parts of the upper gallery of the church where African-American slaves of attached to the church were attached to the families who were shipped could see the altar but couldn't be seen by the congregation. So it was a way to architecturally enforce invisibility of this population, which slavery was legal into the 1830s in New York City. So the preservation of these slave galleries in recent decades and the tours that now you can take to see them and experience them in yourself is an incredibly powerful experience, very subtle preservation intervention to protect them and interpret them, but a very important one to reinforce the multiple values of this place, even to those people who don't worship there. In Philadelphia, I would say that the African-American narrative is even more important as we were talking about at the coffee break. Noha was asking me about just a little bit about what Philadelphia like. Well, it's about half African-American population, 44% or so, very high poverty rates. And the black churches, which this is one church of the advocate near Temple University, are incredibly important cultural centers. Again, not only for worship, not only for the architectural values, many of them have sort of succeeded through several buildings, but for their contemporary social work and what you would call inherited strength, not only their heritage values and the social values of those heritage places, but the societal values, the ways that these places, these historic sacred places and black churches serve the rest of the city in a way that's kind of additional to but enabled by their heritage assets. So in Church of the Advocate, there's this amazing set of murals inside the church from the 1970s that represent, sorry, I'm trying to feel like I'm trying to play keyboards in the dark here, trying to interpret civil rights struggles and the towering national as well as local figures of the civil rights era in a series of murals that very unabashedly kind of mimics, but follows in the footsteps of ecclesiastical art that in medieval era would have stood for the kind of religious symbolism that stand for worship. So it's a kind of civic worship, if you will, found to open the building as a kind of an art center and essentially a sort of art museum. Mother Bethel AME Church is another incredibly important religious story and social story in Philadelphia. The AME congregation is a very important kind of social building narrative for African Americans, especially in Philadelphia. And the program, you might say, of worship, of social services, of political advocacy, of political organizing by Mother Bethel congregation and its very charismatic leader, Mark Tyler, is an incredible societal asset. And I would argue is absolutely deeply, deeply linked to its continued worship in its own building. And this is an enormous issue in Philadelphia these days and the reason we did this project that I'll show you at the end of the slides, we are losing historic sacred places very quickly for all sorts of different reasons. Many of them happen to do simply with urban economics and the changing character of neighborhood life in different parts of Philadelphia, gentrification in one part of the city and disinvestment in others. That in a way is the story of the last hundred years in Philadelphia and many other big cities because of the general lack of protection of historic sacred places like Mother Bethel, which is one of the few that are actually protected by statutory regulation. Because they are so threatened, they become a real worry not just to the historic preservation and conservation field but to people who are worried about education. These places are often locations of daycare centers and nurseries for social services. They are the places where alcoholic synonymous and other kinds of support groups are often organized. They are very important centers for social services related to what in the US are called recently returned citizens, people who have just been released from jail. And the racial categorization, the racial implications of all those societal issues are very, very strong. The number of people incarcerated in the US, the proportion of people incarcerated in the US is overwhelmingly African American, very far out of proportion to their proportion in the population. So it's not an incidental connection that the heritage, social and societal values are stacked in these particular locations, really making them much more than just conservation responsibilities and opportunities, but real community development and social service ones. So at the risk of being way too professorial and didactic, I've got five minutes left and that's good because I've got five points left to deliver. And none of this will be on the exam. So the values-based conservation theoretical work that I showed you at the first in the form of these Getty publications, that was really just one moment in a much longer arc of theory and theoretically informed practice that's openly reflective of these questions about why and how we make decisions. As this discourse continues and tries to capture the new issues and the new insights of changing societies, changing cultures, my academic work has been very much wrapped up in trying to redeploy and improve and critique values-based conservation in order to make it more useful for practitioners. There's another kind of line of heritage research that many of you probably know a lot about, critical heritage studies. That is a very important contribution to this debate but is purposefully and purposefully detached from practice in many ways. So I'm trying to kind of steer a path between the purely critical and purely practical and always kind of keep a dialogue between them. So the four points that I think are in a way the open issues that are in a way-these are my research program for the next generation. How do we keep up with changing cultural values? And you can think about this in a million different ways. How many of you have a smartphone with you? Have those things changed the way we consume culture and think about relationships and construct our way through the world? Absolutely. Do we understand what that means for heritage? We haven't barely even started. So there are all sorts of cultural issues about really big cultural change that are still to be reckoned with. An issue that I was researching 20 years ago and it really sort of in a way kind of led to an essentially contested question. How do we deal with the fact that cultural values and economic values or the discourses about valuation within economics and within cultural fields are essentially are incommensurable? On one hand, converting all kinds of value to dollars or some other kind of unit and taking away idiosyncrasy. On the other hand, valuing idiosyncrasy, valuing its sort of singularity. Both of those kinds of valuation contribute to heritage decisions every day and every place, but we kind of let them be separate. And it's rare that we find really robust and useful ways to connect economic and cultural valuation. There are a lot of interesting attempts to do it, but I would argue that the magic algorithm has not been found. The idea that heritage and societal values are always at issue in any kind of conservation decision. I would accept that as a critique of me trying to argue maybe a little bit over-strangously that it's these societal values. Or as my colleague Erika Abrami terms them, the instrumental values of heritage places that I think have taken on much more weight and urgency in the last few years, especially at least in American practice. And there's a real sort of radical change embedded in that. To what extent are we who identify as conservationists comfortable with conservation happening for reasons that have nothing to do with conservation? That have to do with serving people who recently returned from jail or that have to deal with contemporary politics of African American identity. There's a potential, if not actual, great deal of conflict between those two strains of thought. And to make it even more difficult, it's proven very vexing to try to deal with all these different ways of thinking about value in terms of public policy. Because our public policies, again, mostly from the American experience, but I think it's largely the same here, are very much attuned to thinking about heritage values and to thinking about our work as dealing with objects. Whereas theory is more and more convincing us that we need to understand the processes and the uses and the functions of heritage places, intangible aspects or the instrumental uses are, as convincing, or if not more, prompts to do conservation than the traditional heritage value archiving, heritage values, if you will. So it's not a matter of deciding which side of these dualities we're going to invest in. I think very much that in practice we have to figure out how we try to have it both ways to be good stewards and good archivists when it comes to architectural, urban and landscape fabric, and serve contemporary society for the instrumental values and instrumental reasons that we know are embedded in the social processes of how people use these places. So the last thing I'll say, and I won't go any deeper, I have a bunch of other maps to show you on this, but to try again to bring these kinds of work together, the theoretical and empirical, my colleagues and I got a big foundation grant to do a study of Philadelphia's historic sacred places. There are 838 of them built, the date to be 4 in 1965, and we surveyed all of them and mapped them and did a lot of sort of interrogatory mapping of where these places were, and the kinds of uses that they had in the different sort of social geographies of the city, where were the racial geography, the geography of economic disadvantage and so forth and so on. We also did very in-depth interviews with 22 of the congregations, the people, the organizations that live in these places that create the social process, create those instrumental values, and our interviews with them revolve not around the kind of values litany, the kind of categories that have become very second nature to us in conservation. We talked to them about bigger and different terms of viability, we talked about vulnerability and resilience. Let me ask them essentially in different ways, how do you feel that your congregation and your building are vulnerable, and how do you feel you've been resilient? We've got some really fascinating answers and also some very surprising answers about how to kind of take care of the heritage place and mount in practical terms a social program in an environment where there's really no statutory protection and no government investment. So I'll be happy to tell you a lot more about all these issues about food healthy or elsewhere, but in the meantime I will yield and thank you for your attention.