In 2013, I embarked on a journey both literal and figural. Thanks to support from the American Academy in Rome and the National Trust for Historic Preservation, I moved to Rome for six months so that I could investigate a question I had hoped to study for more than a decade: why do old places matter? What difference does it make to people if we save, reuse, or simply continue to use old places—or don’t? Do old places enhance and improve people’s lives and, if so, how? While exploring Rome and the many layers of history embedded in that astonishing palimpsest of an old city, I finally had the great gift of time to try to understand this central facet of both our work and our human experience.
Why did I embark on this journey? Aren’t the reasons obvious? As someone posted on Facebook in response to one of my essays, “kinda crazy that the question even has to be asked.” I was motivated to explore this topic because I had a sense that people who care about old places—many of whom may not even be conscious that they care until something is threatened or lost—didn’t have ready words to express why old places make such a difference to them and to their communities, even though many of us feel the importance intuitively and often very deeply. Though explanations existed in textbooks, statutes, books, and articles, the reasons, to my knowledge, had never been gathered and stated together concisely in one publication.
The American Academy in Rome, by McKim, Mead, and White, built in 1913. Charles Follen McKim was a founder and early supporter of the academy.
Paul Edmondson/National Trust for Historic Preservation
After decades as a preservation professional for the National Trust for Historic Preservation—a lawyer, teacher, trainer, practitioner—I thought collecting these reasons would be a relatively simple task. I quickly realized that this project was going to be more daunting than I had imagined. Yet what I also discovered, to my delight, was a much larger world of people thinking and writing about place from multiple perspectives related to historic preservation but not in the preservation field, including environmental psychology, place attachment, place identity, cultural geography, phenomenology, aesthetic theory, sustainability, biophilia, geopsychology, health, and neuroscience, as well as the stalwarts of the field—architecture, planning, history, critical heritage studies, historic preservation, architectural history, and urbanism. I don’t pretend to be an expert in all or even most of these fields, but I’ve sought to understand the work of scholars looking at place from these individual disciplines and to discern the key points that might be meaningful for people of all backgrounds who care about older places.
What I found is that, yes, old places do indeed matter—and for more reasons than I thought. From memory and identity, to architecture and history, to beauty and sacredness, to economics and sustainability, old places matter for reasons so numerous, all encompassing, and essential to who we are as individuals and as a society that their place in our lives is difficult to fully recognize. The kaleidoscopic list of reasons in this book suggests just how important older places are. Yet even these essays, which treat the topics singly, can only hint at the totality—the all-encompassing world of meaning that old places have for us. The old places of our lives are like the air we breathe: surrounding us, sustaining us, influencing us, and even a part of us.
Ultimately, I wrote about the fourteen ideas I heard most frequently when I talked with people about why old places mattered to them. These words capture many of the main concepts, but I continue to hear more. Among the other words I heard were comfort, reconciliation, craftsmanship, knowledge, grounding, and belonging, all worthy of further exploration. Our living relationship with old places is supple, subtle, and changeable. Any one place may reflect many of these reasons. Different ideas will resonate with different people at the same place. Some people will respond to one place but not another. And our relationships with places may change over a lifetime.
Although many people study place, only a handful choose to focus their work on older and existing places. Almost all the attention is on new places—on placemaking rather than place sustaining. For example, in the world of environmental sustainability, much attention is given to green products and to building new green buildings, but little attention is given to the importance of continuing to use the resources we already have. Similarly, in the world of planning, particularly new urbanism, much attention is given to building new communities that are walkable and dense in a way that fosters people’s capacity to form community, but very little attention is given to sustaining existing communities, which have already become community through the intertwining of people and place over time. It’s almost as if these existing older places are so much a part of our lives that they are invisible. One of my goals here is to make older places more visible.
By the very nature of the individual disciplines that study place, almost none of them strives to see the whole—the overarching totality of the role old places play in our lives. That’s a key reason why I believe this series of essays is necessary—to try to get a greater glimpse of the meaning of old places by gathering the individual reasons together. Altogether, the old places of our lives give us, to borrow a phrase from a program at the University of North Carolina Greensboro, an internal compass that orients us in our lives and helps us know who, what, where, and sometimes even why we are.
The essays that follow were issued serially through the National Trust’s Preservation Forum blog from November 2013 through April 2015 and were followed by an issue of the Forum Journal dedicated to the topic with articles by other writers. My ideas developed as I explored the individual topics. Had I known at the beginning what I knew at the end, I obviously might have changed the order or emphasis.
That learning process has not ended with the publication of these essays. I’ve since been inspired by the comments and reactions that these essays have sparked, particularly from people who are working to save places that they care about. Here are a few of my favorites:
Old buildings are more than stones and creaky floors; they hold deep human memory, both painful and exultant.—Sr. Maureen
I’m so happy to read and share with others how important connectivity with our past is to living in the present day. I’ve been discouraged many days but today my spirit is renewed.—Evelyn Terry
Old places matter, as they are places of the heart.—Mechelle Lawrence Adams
It is my hope that this book encourages more people to think about why old places matter to them. I hope that it gives people phrases and words to help them articulate and express their deeply held feelings about the old places of their lives and that it helps to build a stronger ethic of appreciating, saving, and continuing to use old places.
This ethic is necessary to build both the political support for laws and policies—and the simple goodwill—that helps people and communities retain the places that matter. We need to be able to express the reasons—and share the evidence that supports them—with mayors, elected officials, planners, developers, and each other and to continue to build the case for retaining and nurturing the existing places where we live, work, and play. But more importantly, if we broaden our understanding of the old places in our communities and our own lives, we may help people lead more fulfilling and richer lives. These places spur our memory, delight us with beauty, help us understand others, give us a deep sense of belonging, and, perhaps most fundamentally, remind us who we are.