 I am Tom Mays and I am delighted that you're here today for this session. Please note that in addition to this session on Wild Places Matter, there's another session tomorrow that will continue this conversation called Beauty and the Bottom Line with Don Ripcima and I hope you'll join that as well. I have a couple of very practical things to mention first. This is being video recorded, so please be aware of that as you move around. And if I could ask you all to please all turn off your ringers on your cell phones. I would appreciate that. There will be people circulating through the room, throughout the presentations, to take questions as questions occur to you. We're going to hopefully spend about 30 minutes of our time taking questions from the audience. And I would very much appreciate it if you would submit them. We will try to sort them and then we will address them as a panel after each of us does about 12 to 15 minutes of a presentation. Please signal the room monitor if you need assistance during the session. And feel free to tweet this. And Priyachaya who's walking around the room has asked me to remind you to use the hashtag past forward. So thank you. Look forward to seeing your tweets on this. First I'd like to introduce the other speakers who are seated down here at this table. We'll each come up to the podium and turn. Their bios are in the materials online, but I'm going to ask Jeremy Wells to speak who is a professor at Roger Williams University and Max Page who is a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. And they'll be joining me today for this panel on why old places matter. So as many of you know over the past year, I've been in this exploration around why old places matter to people thanks to the National Trust for Historic Preservation and to the American Academy in Rome, the two institutions that gave me the opportunity to do that. I think many of you have read the blog post that I've been issuing the essays and if you haven't I encourage you to go to them and read them. I'm not today choosing to use this very small amount of time to reiterate what those posts say. Instead what I'd like to do is focus on the things I learned that surprised me about why old places matter to people and that I think point into directions for the future of the type of work that we do. I've invited Max and Jeremy to share this session because their work is furthering some of those directions. Jeremy's going to talk about what we know and what we don't know scientifically about why old places matter and the relationship between people in old places. Max is going to talk about sites with difficult histories and the potential meaning that can be unlocked through those sites of conscience. Both of them are really going to get to the heart of why old places actually matter to people to a deep fundamental meaning and I was really struck this morning by the way all of the panelists grounded their work in place in how it matters for people and I hope this session will help further the thoughts that they spurred for us this morning. Please as we go through, as you think of questions, go ahead and write them on these cards and Pria will circulate and pick them up. So my exploration of why old places matter began with this introduction almost exactly a year ago today and so far I've written about a whole host of reasons that old places matter to people. I've written about continuity, memory, individual identity, civic identity, beauty, history, architecture, creativity, learning, sustainability and I intend to write about economics, how economics makes a difference and also commemoration and probably a few other topics. I don't really think there's a limited number of reasons that old places matter to people. I think that there are a vast number of reasons and each place presents a different type of reason, a different layering of reasons, a different set of reasons and each person's relationship with that place may present different reasons. But what I want to do today is focus on three of these, three of the essays that I think are really the most critical to understanding why old places actually do make a difference to people. And the first one I'm going to begin with is this idea of continuity. The first three are continuity, memory and individual identity and I use these words but they're not necessarily the only words that can describe these reasons. But collectively I think they really somehow capture the whole notion of why people care about places so much and why places are so deeply meaningful to people. All three of these relate to current studies in place attachment and place identity and current social sciences research. I will confess that as a 30-year veteran of the historic preservation field I knew very little about the social science of place attachment and so this was something that I learned about that was almost a revelation to me and that's why I've asked Jeremy to come and speak to you about what is currently known in the social sciences about the relationship between people and places and old places in particular. I said I was going to start with continuity and I'm not going to go through all the details of continuity but I'm going to pick up a couple of key things and I'm going to read some quotes. Here's what continuity is all about. In a world that is constantly changing, old places provide people with the sense of being part of a continuum that's necessary for them to be psychologically and emotionally healthy. Maria Luica, an environmental psychologist says, the majority of authors agree that development of emotional bonds with places is a prerequisite of psychological balance and good adjustment and that it helps to overcome identity crises and gives people the sense of stability they need in an ever-changing world. The images I've chosen to illustrate this are first, a schoolhouse. Many of us have struggled to preserve schoolhouses and we've seen how much schoolhouses matter to people in their communities and it is because of that sense of continuity and memory and identity that are bound up in them. The power of this sense of continuity is really most dramatically illustrated when it's broken. So you see on the left hand side Palmer Chapel in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and that is a place where people were forcibly removed when it became a national park and the communities have never fully recovered from that removal. That is the site of one of the reunions for the families that generations later continue to go back to the same place to try to heal some of the wounds created from the breaking of their own identity with that place. The other site shown is Materra in Italy which I visited when I was at the American Academy. Again, a place where people were physically removed because the housing was considered substandard and removed to new housing elsewhere and people their three generations later still talk about how broken their community is as a result of that and how much they feel lost as a result of that break, continuity. The other major word I used was memory and again I'm going to read just a point or two. Without memory we're hardly ourselves and those of us who have had parents who suffered from Alzheimer's or other relatives who suffered from Alzheimer's know what happens when we lose our memory and we are essentially no longer ourselves. Here's the quote, there is as the geographers Stephen Holscher and Derek Alderman say an inextricable link between memory and place. People anchor their divergent memories in place. Here I use two examples. An example, the Cafe Reggio in New York, which I went to in my 20s with my then-girlfriend which was a long time ago and I go back there periodically and it allows me to measure who I am now by virtue of revisiting that place. That sense of memory helps me confirm who I am and also measure who I've become. And I use the reflecting pool at the Lincoln Monument, the Lincoln Memorial As an example of collective memory, memories that we all share together and I think we can all identify places like that where our memories of specific events are seared into our personality and into our identity. These places serve as mnemonic aids and they're critical to why old places matter. Last of the trilogy is individual identity. Old places embody identity and people have long recognized this relationship. This is a quote from James Marston Fitch. Preservation affords the opportunity for citizens to regain a sense of identity with their own origins of which they have been robbed by the sheer process of urbanization. Virtually everyone who has studied the issue in a wide variety of fields confirms the links between place and identity. There are those who even theorize that we aren't ourselves outside of place, that we are so tied with place that our identity is place and the way I think of this is what's the first question you ask someone when you meet them? Where are you from? And that's because that tells people more about who someone is than virtually any other particular fact. So that's sort of my trilogy of the three that I've chosen to talk about that I think are the three that are at least understood in our field and at least articulated in our field. But here's one of the surprising things I discovered. As I was writing about identity and individual identity, I stumbled across the fact that in my hometown of Charlotte, North Carolina, a preservation group had been formed to save Eastland Mall, the 1975 Mall of my junior high school years. And I was stunned by this and I couldn't quite make sense of it. A couple of thoughts. First, the local preservation review board actually designated the signs and the signs were removed and reused as a community art project. The local newspaper talked about how Charlotte embodied, how Eastland Mall actually embodied the identity of Charlotte and the guy who was given the demolition contract to tear the place down actually set up a memory site where people could share their memories of Eastland Mall because he had met his wife skating at this ice skating rink. So I puzzled over this. What does this mean for our field that a place like Eastland Mall is a place that embodies this sense of identity and continuity and memory? And here just a couple of examples of the essays that showed up in the press. The end of Eastland Mall and sharing of Eastland Mall memories. So one of the things I concluded as a result of this is that it doesn't actually take very long for a place, in fact it may only take a generation, my generation in this case, for a place to begin to have those attachments of identity and memory and continuity. And I think this potentially has ramifications for the type of work we do and what we choose to do. So I looked then at some of the traditional tools and you all know I wrote about architecture and I wrote about history. Our traditional ways of designating properties focus primarily on architecture and on history and they only seem to get to these ideas of continuity and identity and memory as a secondary effect, not as a primary effect. These ideas are themselves important and I am in no way suggesting that we cease designating things on the basis of architecture and history. I am an architecture fanatic and a history nut so I love both of those things but I do think it points in a different direction for how we apply these tools. And one of the things I would point to in particular is this question about time. Rather we look at things like the period of significance. Is that really a relevant factor when we are looking at trying to preserve communities in order to fulfill purposes like continuity and identity and history? The other factor that is present in history is the idea that when we are looking at history and defining history we are often leaving things out. So if we are looking at preserving only a specific era we end up erasing certain eras of history and that is one reason I asked Max to speak. I asked him to talk about what happens when history is not adequately remembered and how it can be brought back forward. So this disconnect between these three primary purposes for historic preservation I think we see and we sense and here is where we see and sense them. At historic preservation commissions I have often experienced this situation where someone will testify about how important a place is to them. And the chair of the historic preservation commission as he is legally obligated to do will lean down and say thank you for your testimony but I hope you understand that the things you have been talking about are not relevant to our criteria. That seems to me to be missing some of the point of what I hope we are trying to achieve and I simply raise that question and note that disconnect. At the same time that I was thinking about this notion of the disconnect between some of our traditional tools and these three primary purposes I was also writing about sustainability and I wanted to focus on sustainability a little bit today because I think it is the one area that has the greatest capacity to be a game changer for historic preservation. I wrote about it and I wrote about the issues of and this is not my work it's the work of the preservation green lab of other institutions of the many people who have been studying the sustainability of historic places and older places but I talked about avoided impacts and embodied energy phrases that I think you all have all heard about and I really came away thinking that between these three ideas of continuity and memory and identity and the issue of sustainability and the idea of trying to not tear buildings down and throw them in a landfill and waste all that energy and then waste all the energy of building a new building that we might it might point in a different direction about what we should be doing and here are the directions. Perhaps recognizing that the existing built environment regardless of age supports the primary reasons that old places matter continuity stability memory and identity and focusing on the evolution of place rather than an earlier period of significance and finally changing the paradigm from one where we're just saving a few things to one that encourages reuse and preservation and continuity instead of demolition which will also serve these sustainability goals. I know some of these ideas are provocative and I'm looking forward to having a conversation around them but now I'd like to invite Dr. Jeremy Wells to the podium to talk a little bit about what we know about the social science and what we don't know about the social science. Okay so what I'm going to talk about here is really a very fast, I'll call it a meta-analysis. There's way too much information for me to go into in any depth but what I'm going to try to do within about 15 minutes or so here is to give you an idea of what is it about the social sciences, what can the social sciences tell us in terms of what's important about historic preservation about the practice of historic preservation and why old places are important to people. And one of the first things I would like to start with is a basic fundamental question why is historic preservation important? Why are older places important? The theme of this particular session. And when answering this question I would say that we need to have some sort of evidence. So if we're going to make a claim as to why historic preservation is important we need to provide evidence for that particular claim. And we do this all the time in historic preservation. We've got a lot of good quantitative evidence for instance in terms of economics. We know that preservation makes good economic sense. We've got good data to provide as evidence that it makes good economic sense. And similarly we know for instance that from a sustainability standpoint preservation is green. It's certainly a good thing to do, building reuse, recycling, embodied energy. We have good data to provide as evidence. And if you might notice a theme here, a pattern, this is quantitative data. We can get numbers to provide as evidence no matter what your discipline or field is people pay a lot of attention to it. Problem that we have in historic preservation is that we've got a lot of these squishy kind of claims that are made all the time. For instance historic places have a unique sense of place. What is that? How would you provide evidence for that? Or historic places foster community identity. So think about some of these ideas. Or what about historic places enrich our lives? I mean what does it even mean about if you could have a historic place that doesn't enrich our life? I mean these are very squishy ideas, subjective values that are in here and so what kind of evidence do we have to support these sorts of claims that we hear all the time in historic preservation? And this is really the big question that I'm offering here. And it leaves us in kind of a dangerous position right now. And I love this quote from Daniel Borstyn who's a historian. And he says, quote, the great menace to progress is not ignorance, but the illusion of knowledge. And where we are in historic preservation practice today is we are assuming that we actually have the answers to those claims. We have evidence to back up those claims, but we really don't. But we're not alone. And I'm a huge proponent of multi-disciplinarity, working with other fields and collaborating. And we can go to, for instance, in the built environment, our friends in planning and architecture have been looking at something called environment behavior research since the early 1970s. There's a really proactive organization out there called the Environmental Design Research Association. I started up the network area there for historic preservation where we're looking at human environment interactions in older places. There's some really good evidence-based design, conclusions that have come out of this type of research. For instance, in healthcare facilities design, we know, for instance, that if you put a window in a room, in a patient recovery room, that patients will actually recover more quickly. If you have a view to nature outside of that room, you know that patients will recover even more quickly. There's all sorts of evidence out there in terms of how we design the built environment that makes places better for people. So there's a platform here in the use of social sciences in how the built environment is designed. Our friends in environmental conservation have been looking at the use of social sciences in the practice of conservation for about 10, 15 years now, and the way that they're beginning to frame the problems in environmental conservation is that this is not a problem of science. It's not a problem of hard data that we have. It's a social problem. And along these lines, I came across what I thought was a really remarkable paragraph out of conservation biology. This was an editorial that Michael Mascia published in 2003, and I'm not going to read this section from the article to you as it exists now, but I thought it was remarkable if you take and highlight in red the discipline-specific terms. So these are environmental conservation discipline-specific terms. What if you yank those out and put in our terms, the terms of historic preservationist? This becomes remarkable when you read it, and I'll go ahead and do that. The disconnect between our art historical knowledge and preservation success has led to a growing sense among historic preservationists and practitioners that social factors are often the primary determinants of success or failure. Although it may seem counterintuitive that the foremost influences on the success of preservation policy could be social, preservation interventions are the product of human decision-making processes and require changes in human behavior to succeed. Thus, preservation policies and practices are inherently social phenomena as are the intended and unintended changes in human behavior they induce. This is where we are in historic preservation today in terms of looking at how we're substantiating the practice of preservation and really what's the problem, where we are right now in terms of advancing our field and in trying to get more stakeholders involved in preservation. But we do know some things. I mean, it's not all hope is not lost. We actually do know quite a few things about the older built environment in terms of what people like and what they don't like. There's a lot of research, and this comes out of environmental design behavior research in terms of looking at what is it from a design standpoint that people like about buildings. And these studies that have been done, not a huge number of them, but what Arthur Stamps is a particularly prolific researcher in this area, looking at what is it that people like about buildings. And these visual preference studies would show people essentially photographs of different kinds of buildings and surveys people what do people like and don't like about these buildings. Overwhelmingly, the conclusions of these studies is that people like complexity in buildings. They like ornamentation. They like roofs that have complexity of designs and angles and planes, receiving planes, all these sorts of things that we often see in older buildings, for instance. We know that in a similar sense that people like these sort of characteristics in landscape. People prefer landscapes that are layered that have a sense of discovery and a sense of mystery to them. And this happens naturally over time when vegetation grows and trees get bigger, things become hidden, and you have to actually explore the environment in order to discover it. There are a few visual preference studies out there that have asked the basic question, do people like old buildings? And this is always usually paired as a dichotomy of a picture of whatever the old building is that's of interest and whatever the new or newer building is. And I can say with a relative degree of certainty, if you summarize these studies, generally speaking, people do prefer older buildings. Sort of, it depends. These are very difficult studies to do because buildings exist in kind of a context. So if you look, for instance, on the building on your right, do people dislike contemporary architecture? Because in this case, it's in the sea of parking. Context is something here that is difficult to tease out when you do these visual preference studies. So you have to be very careful when you make sort of conclusions from this what it's actually trying to say. But again, generally speaking, people in these surveys do prefer older buildings. Not all the time, though. One of the themes that emerges from these studies is that when people are given images of buildings from modernist era, modernist era buildings, for instance, a brutalist building, people prefer neo-traditional buildings, new buildings compared to buildings from that era. But if you look at studies where the design is a constant, you're only looking at the age of buildings. For instance, in this case, neo-traditional buildings or traditionally designed buildings, people do like the genuine building. So again, there's a lot of areas here to look at. We don't have definitive evidence here, but we have some clues in terms of people's preferences. But everything I've been talking about to this point, this is not really the domain of historic preservation. I mean, we're talking about environmental design, urban design. What is it that we do as historic preservationists that's kind of unique? That is unique. And if you look at what we're charged to do as historic preservationists, we're charged to determine what's the real historic place, the real historic building, and the not real historic building. We're trying to determine what's authentic and what's not. So what sort of research has been done in the area of historical authenticity? What do people think and feel is historically authentic and not? And I can tell you this is a wide open area of research. You can find very, very little information in terms of empirical evidence from the social sciences that looks at authenticity. This is one area that I've been trying to research, and one of the conclusions that I've come to is there is definitely a relationship between what makes old places unique, age value, which is dependent on patina, the way that surfaces change over time, the way that surfaces decay. I know a lot of you here are probably familiar with Ruskin, John Ruskin, it's what he called the Golden State of Time. And it is what makes old places different from new places, even if they have the same kind of design. What's interesting is that if people are in an historic environment and they perceive the patina of that place, it catalyzes what I've termed a kind of a spontaneous fantasy. It's a vignette of the past that pops up in a non-pre-meditated manner as people are going through this environment. This is not daydreaming. This is not something under direct conscious control. And the people that I've worked with in these sorts of studies, these vignettes just pop up in their head, catalyzed by experiencing essentially the authenticity of a place. These are described as emotional experiences, sometimes highly emotional experiences, and it bonds people emotionally with place. And so one of the things I've been able to establish is quantitatively that in authentically historic environments with patina, people have a higher level, a higher measurement of attachment to that place. And so this is, I think, a very interesting way of looking at what is it unique about historic environments and how do people perceive authenticity of those environments. Some other research along these lines, Daniel Levi has looked at, can people actually tell fake historic architecture from real historic architecture, and he's come to the conclusion that, yes, people actually can. And one of the interesting conclusions from this in terms of practices, you know, maybe we're not giving people enough credit when, for instance, we're applying preservation doctrine, Secretary of the Interior's standards. You know, we're making a lot of assumptions here in terms of differentiation of old and new. We don't have any empirical evidence to know how people interpret old and new. I mean, think about that. Major factor in preservation practice, no evidence to substantiate how we do it. We're getting some clues here. Some other areas in terms of design and in terms of authenticity is that we know that most stakeholders, when you ask what sort of design would be appropriate as infill construction in, say, pre-World War II traditional historic districts, they're looking at the same things that most design professionals do, similar form, massing, scale, fenestration, but they take it a step further and they want the exact same ornamentation and they'll even use phrasing like copy, which we know in terms of preservation doctrine is not the way that we like to see things done in terms of the way things get differentiated. But the way that informants are describing this experience is it maintains the authenticity by the infill construction sort of receding into the background. It's not the primary focus. Some other areas of rather interesting research that's been done in terms of older buildings, Melinda Milligan who is a sociologist out of Sonoma State University has taken on to herself this, she wants to know how homeowners of historic homes, how they perceive and value their historic homes. And she's come to the conclusion that people essentially turn their homes into living, breathing people. The anthropomorphize their homes in the way that they take care of them. And the last thing I want to conclude with here in terms of some of the research is that there's been an interesting growing area of a body of research that intersects historic preservation and heritage conservation practice in the social sciences under the rubric of heritage studies. And so largely driven by anthropologists, they're very interested in communication and the differences between professional value systems and the value systems of most stakeholders. And in fact, we have a word for this that Laura Jane Smith has given us. The value system of historic preservation professionals, she refers to that as the authorized heritage discourse. It's essentially what preservation doctrine is telling us as preservation practitioners what is appropriate, what is not appropriate. But this sort of research is really looking at, there's a really, really strong and real disconnect between preservation practice and most stakeholders and also in terms of how we actually communicate. Now, what don't we know? This is the real big issue here. We know far less than we actually know about the older built environment in terms of people's preferences and values and experiences. We really don't know what makes places historic to most stakeholders. There's not a lot of empirical evidence to support this. We have some tantalizing clues, but not a lot. We really don't understand how do everyday people experience and perceive historic places? What is that actually like? And in a real fundamental level, how do historic places affect people? How do they affect people emotionally? What is that different about a historic place and how people experience it versus a non-historic place? And one of the areas I'm really interested in is how do most stakeholders actually describe historic places, describe the activities of saving historic buildings. As historic preservationists, we're really good at talking to each other, just like in this room. We have a common value system here in terms of what we value in the historic environment, what we do with it. We use similar terminology. We're not so good at talking to most stakeholders. If you do surveys, if you look at the surveys and you ask people, do you want to save old buildings? Do you think historic preservation is important? Those surveys always say yes, yes, yes. If you ask those same people, are you in historic preservationists? They say no. What's going on here? We don't know. But if we understand the value systems of most stakeholders better, we have this tantalizing opportunity to be able to communicate in the language of most stakeholders. And if we are trying to, going back to this idea of changing human behavior, if we want to connect with stakeholders and change human behavior, we have to understand the other perspective. And we don't. If we are able to get to the point of understanding more of these values from stakeholders, get a little bit more complicated, what do we actually do with those values? Especially in terms of the regulatory environment. Legal systems are driven by objectivity. And we're talking about trying to understand the subjective nature of being in historic places and lots of conflicting values. How do we get to something useful from this? And this is an open area of research as well. How should this impact practice? We don't have really clear answers for that. So that's my real quick really sliding glance, a sliding blow through social sciences and how that might impact preservation practice and the valuation of place. If you have any questions, send me an email. There's a lot of studies out there. I'd be happy to send you citations. If you want to actually take a look at this, I did not have enough time to go into that today. You can also take a look at my website where I summarize a lot of the areas of research that I've been talking about. So we'll have more time to talk at the end of the session and I'd like to introduce now Max Page, who's going to be talking about issues of sites of conscience. Good afternoon. Wow, look at that sea of people. It's nice to see you all here. I'm really pleased to be part of this discussion today. And I think Tom started with the pantheon, so I thought I would as well. He didn't actually get to experience this. I was in Rome at the American Academy with Tom and I think if I had not bothered him and taken him on many walks and insisted on many conversations, he probably would have written another dozen blog posts by now. I had the joy of spending that time and seeing some of these amazing works of architecture, like the pantheon, this is actually on Pentecost, when the roses are dropped through the oculus of the pantheon makes a nice Jewish boy like me want to become Catholic. It was an incredible experience. Or to look out the window of the academy at this remarkable place, the continuity of human history there, the architectural meaning, the individual and collective identity, all of these things that Jeremy and Tom have been talking about, such as at the Tempietto, just a stone's throw away from the academy. All of these are deeply meaningful and part of our central purpose of what we undertake. I took one of the great walks of my life, actually with Tom, on the Via Appia, where you feel you can have that spontaneous fantasy about thinking about the past and you feel an enormous sense of attachment. So my job is to bring you down a little bit and then hopefully back up. My central point is that one of the key jobs, callings of preservation should be to preserve and interpret and these things cannot be separated, preserve and interpret the difficult places of our society and our communities. I'm going to illustrate that. I'm going to go to West Rome, I'm going to go to Berlin, Buenos Aires and back to Rome, yes, in about 12 to 15 minutes. And I want to explain why this is so central and how difficult places are used in different ways in different countries and these are three places that I know quite well. I begin in Berlin, this is actually my father's scrapbook from the 1936 Olympics before he fled from the Nazis in 1937. So I've had this long dialogue with this place and it's really a whole landscape of difficult sites in Berlin. Germany is an example of a country that is using historic sites as a way to never forget. And so this here you see the ruin of the Gedechniz Kirche, the memorial church, right in the very heart of what was formerly West Berlin. The grassroots archaeology that dug up and recovered the SS headquarters there to show the sites where many of the torture and many of the final solution was developed. It also involves introducing new buildings like Daniel Liebeskin's Jewish Museum into the heart of historic Berlin to introduce a rupture into the landscape. Throughout Berlin it is a remarkable effort through memorials, through historic sites to constantly keep the memory alive and to make the society never forget and to always confront that past. At the very heart of civic Berlin you would think of this, this is the National Holocaust Memorial just off the left of the slide is the Reichstag, the new German parliament, the old, and now again German parliament. It is like if we put a massive four-acre monument to slavery in front of our capital in Washington, D.C. There you see even when I returned and I went to Rome and then I went to Berlin for a few days you see right in front of the Reichstag they have introduced new sites such as this memorial to the Roma and Sinti people who are also murdered in a genocidal fashion. That building, that historic structure is represented when we include these memorials such as this one. Germany has also pioneered what I think is so crucial for us to embrace even more than we have which is the use of artists. See artists as central players in interpreting historic sites such as this is Schimo and Ati's projections of Jewish life into historic buildings so you feel like they almost come alive or Renate Stee and Frieder Schnuck who have put these signs just above street signs they put these other enigmatic signs which document the ways in which Jewish life was steadily circumscribed in 1930s Berlin this indicates it's a hat and it shows the law that says Jews can no longer be hat makers in the city. I end my Berlin trip in a historic site the Babelplatz where there were book burnings by the Nazis in the 1930s and that site is important to say but it is not meaningful or it is not nearly as meaningful without the introduction of this work of art which is an inverted book case and there you see going down 12, 15 feet into the ground are empty bookshelves the books that were burned and also the people that were burned who might have written more books that would contribute to human civilization. Let me take you now far down to Buenos Aires a city that has boomed in the last couple of decades there you see some of the towers or some of the great wealth that has flowed there from all across South America which has led to the demolition of much or a large measure of the 19th century fabric you could see that here now many the preservation the nascent preservation movement there has gotten involved in saving kind of the late 19th century and early 20th century French classical architecture and this is important and good but it is also seemed to be this huge divide between that group and the human rights groups such as the mothers of the May Plaza Magista Plaza de Majo who have fought for now 30, 40 years to find the remains and document what happened to their children in the dictatorship of the 1970s and early 1980s and it is the human rights groups that really not the mainline preservation groups that have focused on preserving and interpreting sites like the Esma, the mechanical school which was one of the main detention centers this is an era of state terrorism which led to the 30,000 we think people who were disappeared by their own government or this is one of the cells in that Esma complex or here another effort to document and interpret the buildings that were torn down by the government as they rammed a huge highway through the downtown to punish reward some and punish other political enemies or in this prison a major prison that was used by the dictatorship in the late 70s period it is actually being torn down and part of the process though of instilling into the memories of the society excuse me what happened here was to bring an artist in who knocked out some windows glass bricks and left others and if you can see there's pixelated images of some of the prisoners who were forced into detention there there are massive memorials as well such as this marking the many people again and so far they've only actually have physical evidence for about 10,000 people but they suspect it's more like 30,000 that were murdered in that short period all throughout the city in front of these police stations that served the detention and torture centers or at the sites of the homes of people who were taken away right in the middle of the night by the police squads there are these grassroots memorials but to me are as central to saving the building as anything that marking these places in innovative ways so that people stumble across them is a crucial way to keep the memory alive again, these signages this is an arts group that has put up signs to indicate some of the culprits in this dictatorship including yes, our own CIA or even the Catholic Church in Argentina which assisted the dictatorship there now, this is the motto for the kind of human rights movement the Memoria de la Justicia memory, truth and justice and this is an important distinction in how historic these difficult sites are used in Argentina it's not about simply not forgetting an event that is long past because this is an ongoing event in part because the families still have not recovered the bodies and secondly because many of the perpetrators have not been convicted so these historic sites, these difficult places were used to finally bring these guys to justice and it's because of the mobilization and the artwork and the preservation of these sites and documentation of them that finally these guys who were pardoned by an earlier conservative government were in 2010 beginning in 2010 brought to justice and I actually had a chance to go there and this ticket to watch the workings of justice the results of years of memory work and historic preservation advocacy to me is one of the most valuable momentos I have from that time there now I'm bringing you back quickly to Rome so when I come with that background when I came to the time at the American Academy to look at how was Rome remembering the era of Mussolini the fascist dictator and ally of Hitler what is happening there when you go to Rome and you go down this many of you have seen this image or walked this path you think you are walking sort of an ancient Roman way to look at the Colosseum you are looking at a Mussolini avenue designed to link him to the great Roman leaders that he emulated or if you walk to the Vatican as anyone would if they go to Rome you are not looking at a great work of Renaissance architecture at least the avenue is not the building is this avenue is a Mussolini avenue in other words this was built as a way of illustrating or as a kind of a gift to the Vatican for the detente between fascism which had been opposed to the church and the church finally in 1929 kind of coming to some kind of agreement so this vista which we now think of as so essential to the Vatican is in fact a legacy of Mussolini and fascism throughout the city you will find some still major propaganda sites such as the EUR a huge exposition center on the southern part of the city this is his square Colosseum this was supposed to be a great celebration of Mussolini after the 20 years of fascism in 1942 it never was completed and the fair was never held because the regime was collapsing the Foro Italico not far from the Vatican is a vast sports complex that was built by Mussolini to mark the reemergence of the Italian Empire that is when they conquered Ethiopia and so here at the entrance to this great this athletic complex it says Mussolini Ducs Mussolini our leader obviously this was taken recently and it is still there throughout the plaza which is the largest mosaic projects in ancient times you see 248 repetitions of Il Duce our leader this is like Heil Hitler this is the chant for Mussolini and you see it everywhere there and then in the track it is ringed by a hundred different massive sculptures and is this sports complex that people walk through to get to the main soccer stadium so every week thousands and thousands of people cross that mosaic plaza the difference is there is no interpretation at all there is no artwork, there is no signage there is nothing to make or encourage citizens of Rome to think about the meaning of this place you still see deeply offensive portrayals of Ethiopians being raised up by Italian culture nothing said, nothing discussed what stunned me about my time in Rome was how contrary to Germany where memory is perhaps almost overdone and contrary to Buenos Aires where there is a powerful utility to historic sites to bring people to justice in Rome there is silence about these places there is a sense that we must move beyond this we cannot confront this history and you see even there is a celebration of some of the great modernist rationalist buildings of the 1930s under Mussolini such as Luigi Moretti's Jill building, Moretti some of you may know if you are at work for the National Trust he designed the Watergate apartment complex but that Moretti building also includes another map of Africa laying out the plans for domination by Mussolini and that orb on the right was used to have a bust of Mussolini there and throughout the city in smaller places in door stops or out on the fountains of Piazza Navona or on water drains you will see the fasche that is the bundled sticks with an axe which is the symbol of the ancient Roman leader and became Mussolini's symbol and it is a kin in a way to the swastika it became the dominant image those are everywhere as you walk around Rome and I ended up spending far too many times far too much of my time looking down at my feet looking for these remnants when you ask people even educated even progressive left wing people in Rome show me where I can learn about Italian fascism and Mussolini they direct you to the Fauste Ardeatina which is a monument to Nazi a Nazi murder of 300 young men the Nazis controlled Rome for nine months and this was one of the most awful massacres which of course is a moving place but it is not about Mussolini and Italian fascism similarly they say go to the Vietasso Museum well that also is a very moving place where in fact Italian resistors were punnit were imprisoned and tortured at times but this again is about the Nazis in Rome not about Mussolini and the difficult history of having a fascist leader and his racist policies for 20 years it is no accident in my mind that we see a resurgence of anti-Semitism and anti-immigrant attitudes scrawled on the walls and you see these in a lot of places throughout Italy and it is of course not only Italy and I don't want to overstate my case but I would argue that preserving and again in preserving and interpreting these sites these difficult sites is a part of the way we push aside and push back on these more racist tendencies that seem to periodically resurface I think it has been very effective in Germany along with education system that talks about it but having those places, having powerful monuments of Catholic art is part of the fabric of memory that helps build a more just society now there are some changes going on I'm pleased to say this is Ada Chiarezevi who has looking down at one of the Stolpersteine this is actually a German idea of putting little brass plaques in front of the homes of those who were deported in 1943 in Rome mainly Jews but also non-Jews and every January she lays more of these down the idea of Stolpersteine is you stumble over them they are designed to surprise you so that you are in your daily life you are suddenly woken up and made to think again about what happened on that site similarly at Villa Torlonia which has long been preserved as a wonderful work of late 18th century architecture the home of the Torlonia family it may now get a little pricking because in fact this is where Mussolini lived this is his bedroom you will find a tiny little sign in a corner that says Mussolini slept here in fact this was his, this was the White House this was his main headquarters throughout much of the 1920s and 1930s well now Ada Chiareze's brother is now designing a holocaust museum and memorial on that site again of both Jews and non-Jews who were specifically targeted by the Nazis and this coming January I'm returning to Rome to curate an exhibition in which artists are going to be invited I have been invited and will show their proposals for what should be done in the Foro Italico what kind of public art projects could help Italians and Romans confront this difficult past and here is his notions a little hard to see of actually tearing down that Mussolini ducs obelisk and leaving only the very top there and then spreading the rest out in slabs across that huge mosaic landscape so let me actually conclude with this image this is a photograph actually that I saw the very first week I arrived at the American Academy they had an exhibition and this is called Dometra Opera by Mimo Jodice an important Italian artist and in a way it is a metaphor for what we traditionally try to do as preservationists we save the object, perhaps restore we bring it back to life that's one way to look at this but I kept looking at this photograph it's one of those things that kind of draws you in you can't stop looking and thinking about it I kind of read it differently it seems more of a metaphor for our elusive desire to repair a shattered human world that the hand gently holds a repaired piece up to the original trying to make it fit but of course it doesn't fit perfectly it's only an approximation of wholeness can be made and it requires the gentle hand to hold it there a continuous effort right the hand is there, if it lets go it falls apart we can't heal injuries of the past once and for all we don't just put closure on it and say goodbye I would even use the word sacred duty of historic preservation to lead our fellow citizens to the historic buildings and landscapes that represent our very worst histories or captured our most fundamental disagreements and then like this hand and this image it holds us there and makes us think again who we are thanks I'd like to while the questions are coming up raise a couple of questions for you all first Max I want to make express something I read your presentation as highlighting the unrealized potential of historic places that can't be realized unless we make express this difficult history so the place has meaning because of that embedded history am I misreading that no that's exactly right I mean there is what I've showed are actually places that have been that are still there many of them are falling apart or rotting and might disappear but you're right the key issue is how we bring out that history and promote discussion and debate at those sites I would just like to highlight that there are many scholars around the world that criticize the way we preserve what we choose to preserve and why and how in that point of erasure and it's my perception that we perhaps gain of attention to that any reaction to that thought I certainly think that the reason I said I'm going to bring you down is that much of what I think the two of you spoke about is perfectly right and good is about the positive things we gain in sort of uplifting our lives by through historic preservation but I guess and to therefore I think we often don't save enough of or spend enough time on those places that are frankly difficult I just today had a wonderful tour of slave sites in downtown Savannah and I just loved the woman name was Karen I can't remember her last name part of the slave dwelling project and she said you know some of this is going to make you uncomfortable but the point is let's keep talking that's what we need to be doing I thought it was a beautiful way of capturing what we need to do I'll say I just went to a wonderful lunch speech by George McDaniel the importance of reconciliation at plantation sites acknowledgement identification and I think there's a session later this afternoon with the descendants of slaveholders and the plantation owners so invite all of you to go to that now Jeremy here's the question I'm posing to you there's I think I talked about the things that I think we know in our hearts and you're talking about the scientific evidence that we know from scientific studies so do you have some specific recommendations for the first things we should be looking at to try to objectively examine the things that we know about preservation in our hearts but that we'd like to see studies that demonstrate that that's an excellent question and I look at multiple avenues here I think that one of the areas is really right for research but really for pragmatic purpose of improving practice is understanding people's attachment to historic places and the experience that people have in historic environments that kind of information could also help inform how for instance difficult places should be preserved I think it's an interesting question how do people experience difficult places from an environmental psychology standpoint how might we be more effective at making an argument to save those places using them for remembering our past and not forgetting that I think there's a whole interesting psychological phenomenon that if you think about I think there's a movie called Memento that epitomized this but if you take photographs everybody here does digital cameras do you save the bad photos or do you probably delete them we kind of go through this editing process that we want the past to be sanitized there's been lots of people that have written about this but what's the phenomenon that's going on there that will influence these people in terms of areas of research that I think other than looking at just place attachment experience in historic environments we really need to know how can we do something with the subjective data that will influence the practice of historic preservation and I think a great place to look at this is the intersection of the regulatory environment and well really the social sciences if we get these an understanding of the valuation of place we have this system where our values that we do use in historic preservation are fixed in time and in place on lists Thomas King has written extensively about this that we're very list fixated what if we throw out the list what if we look at systems dynamically I mean Tom talked about this what does that look like is it even compatible with our legal system I mean we're really going into pushing the envelope here in terms of what we should be doing and we don't have clear answers for that you highlighted a study and I don't think you said that you actually did the study but the one compared the new urbanist area to to the historic spontaneous fantasy one yes expand on that a little bit and what what the study was about how you did it so the way I set the study up is that we're close enough here raise your hand if you're familiar with the new urbanist development called ION in Mount Pleasant so a few of you if you haven't been there go there the developer Vince Graham specifically told me he wanted to copy Historic Charleston and he did the best he possibly could within the regulatory environment it's one massive zoning violation that's been approved by the city so what I looked at it was a great opportunity to get at what this age value concept is because here I had a new development ION nothing there existed before 1998 has the same architectural styles in Historic Charleston same sort of setback from the streets same sort of density similar patterns in terms of the road and the transportation and the big difference was age one environment was new one environment was old and I wanted to know what was the difference in people's experience of these two places and so this is what I've just what I ended up discovering and this is a mixed method study where I gave people disposable cameras in both ION and Historic Charleston I told them take photographs of anything in this environment as you're out walking about it that you particularly are interested in and then you're like and then I set up interviews with these people and they just simply told me why they took the photographs and what was going through their heads it was a wonderful experience because I did not talk those of you who do this kind of research that's qualitative research it's fantastic I got really good data and this is where this idea of spontaneous fantasy came up because no one in ION was saying you know like they were like looking at this pre anti-bellum house and seeing the war soldiers marching at the steps or you know cotton wagons going down the street because they see grooves this wasn't happening in ION there was something different there and then when I took it an extra step further and tried to measure the differences in place attachment people were much more strongly attached to Historic Charleston than they were to ION and there was a clear correlation between the experience of spontaneous fantasy and the attachment there was even a correlation between people who essentially thought of their historic or the general environment they were in their neighborhood as sort of a connected in other words that place doesn't exist of like discrete objects like buildings and trees and like bricks and gravel it was like described that they explained that they experienced a place in a holistic way they had stronger levels of spontaneous fantasy and stronger levels of pace attachment people who thought of places atomistically less or so so there's some interesting psychological things going here that I mean again right for the research so when I read that study and as I hear you talk it immediately takes me to this notion that comes out of the preservation green lab book about older smaller better that these are places that are creative also is it the fantasy or the spontaneous imagination that happens that makes these places such good places for the creative economy I think I mean I've thought about that in terms of a theory that it seems to make a whole lot of sense because the way that people describe their experiences in Charleston it sounds like a very creative experience that they were describing I mean I have to give you know if you look at even ion because of the way the landscape was presented in that sense of discovery and the mystery there people really describe both the story Charleston and ion because the urban design elements there as sort of a mental puzzle that they love to exercise their mind over experiencing the environment and whether we're talking preservation of places for that reason or even design new urban design I don't think we ask the question how do we make these places literally the environment itself spur creativity and I think it's been done naturally which is an age factor yeah yeah absolutely so let me I ask one of the questions but let me ask another old places matter and old things matter is there a difference is there a difference between the object and the things and since you ended with an object I'll turn to you first that's a hard question it's funny because I was just about to jump in and ask my own question related to your work I'll invite you to do that which is this question you put the big authenticity sign up Jeremy and I have to say that I'm ready to escape out the back exit when people start running at me my time in Rome made me question the very notion of authenticity and question the use of that in our work there's a great book by Lionel Trillion the literary critic of sincerity and authenticity in which he really takes authenticity to task as almost being this kind of exclusive destructive kind of way of thinking and I think the experience of Rome where in some ways everything feels authentic in fact it's the opposite you realize that when people talk about the Roman form as authentic that is only achieved by leveling removing the layers a thousand years of human history that have been built up above that so I guess I worry when we go down this road of knowing this kind of building is what people like and these are it's because they are authentic and old I worry about that we start to exclude layers of meaning that people have attached and can attach to place well the layers of meaning that ties a little bit to and I think we have some diversity of opinion here because I came away from my research thinking the best thing we can do is try to provide a sense of continuity starting from the existing place not starting from a notion of what the place used to be but starting from the existing place and as I highlighted that didn't require the places to be older than a generation although in a generation you start to see signs of age and signs of patina so I'd love to hear your reaction to that yeah I mean it's really tricky when you're talking about authenticity and then the larger question is okay what do you do with it once you understand about it I really think the key here is looking at what are the values that we're talking about here what values are more important than others I think there are probably clear-cut cases where like historical informational fact value of place probably trumps for instance a desire to erase a bad memory but I think it would be useful for us to start thinking in terms that there are multiple values here that we at least ought to discuss and this has been happening increasingly just in general planning practice and I think it happens in an informal way in a lot of preservation practice but again I would use the phrase burden we have baggage of the past our own past in terms of preservation doctrine that we'll recognize other values in conversation but then we hold it up against the doctrine and as though we can't officially recognize it so we're in this weird place of knowing there are other values out there but knowing we can't do anything with them and I think that's a problem I do think it causes me as I said to question how our tools are being used and I'm not advocating for throwing out the existing tools I think they often work very very effectively but I do think it calls us to question should there be other tools and should we constantly be looking at our legal tools and making sure they're shaped to fit the purpose that we hope to achieve right I think there are obviously real limitations why I kept emphasizing for instance interpretation there's no requirement to tell the story of a historic place that is on the local or state or national register there's no affirmative requirement to actually tell that story and that seems really I wonder how you do it well I'll take it away from requirement and just say I do think there are more and more opportunities to tell the story than there ever have been before and we heard about that this morning a little bit and I think it's a great opportunity so here's another question and this was addressed to me but I'm going to apply it to both of you how do you see the reasons old places matter shifting for millennials so I'll jump in first and say I'm not sure it's hard for me to not think of myself as being young it's a little bit of a struggle to answer this one not quite I didn't used to be a baby boomer but I moved into that so I actually think millennials view places much more flexibly than my generation did and think of historic preservation in much broader terms and in much more creative terms that's my reaction I see some heads nodding we have just a little bit more time so I'd love to ask both of you and I'll start just by saying you know we're talking about directions for preservation grounded in why we think old places matter but I want to start by saying I came away from my project much more firmly convinced that places were more deeply meaningful than I had even thought they were because of the three issues I explored primarily and I know you're interested in social science research that shows that I just wanted to pose that question to you as you've done your work is it your thought that we should seek a deeper meaning or that deeper meaning is there so I'll just pose that I'll start with you and then turn to Jeremy one of the interesting things in this whole discussion is about what is universal what seems to be universal in human connection and what is time bound and so I think we have to ask why are we so concerned with this question today and I think there is I think the globalization I think changes in capitalism all kinds of things are unsettling our connection to place and so there's a universal underlying desire to have connection to place but it is more fraught at the moment so I think it is so important this research to figure out all the varieties of ways that people are searching for a connection to place which will change over time we have to believe that that's a part of the work we do is understanding the changing ways that people connect to place over time thank you Jeremy well I mean we're talking about meaning I mean I'm thinking emotion is a big part of that and it's I mean there's a lot of interesting research out there in psychology in terms of how people make decisions about things for instance and how it is usually based on emotion if I look at my own students the students are most passionate about a particular topic and the ones that perform the best so there's an emotion behind that and so it's again this is a really squishy area but you know meaning and emotion are connected and I guess I don't think we have anywhere near a good description of how that works in the historic environment or just environments in general and trying to get at that is I think it is critical to moving the field of preservation forward and making increasingly relevant because Max and I have students who are definitely in the millennial generation and I absolutely agree that they have a much more fluid thinking in terms of significance and value and I oftentimes have some challenge trying to convince them of what the validity of the secretary of the interior standards are and how it was created so getting to the depth of meaning and understanding that and then trying to do something with that I think is critical or else I think my concern is we're going to become more and more marginalized in terms of what we're trying to do and I think it also has to be more holistic meaning across looking at conservation holistically that we're talking about conserving the environment so if like my research going back to landscape if you look at what makes people really attached emotionally to historic places it is immeasurably bound to landscapes to cultural landscapes, those elements and then we're getting clearly into environmental conservation in this and we need to really look at this much more holistically and broadly and again it gets back to meaning. Thank you both for joining me I very much appreciate what you've brought to this discussion and I think we've got a lot of things to think about and to continue in our work ahead so thank you very much Thank you