Reflections Take Two

I am very interested in the question of preservation or redevelopment of heritage buildings. Coming from a geography background, there are very interesting questions of land use and urban planning and human values. that come into play. There is no right answer to this question, just less worse ones.

It can likely be agreed by almost all that not every heritage building should be kept. By the same token, it can likely be said that not every heritage building should be replaced. The trick is to find the balance both on the community level and the individual lot level where that balance should lie. The issue is made even harder by the secondary question: what even makes a building a heritage building?

That secondary question is one that certainly begs investigation. Is it simply age? If it is, what is the cut-off? If the cut-off is 100 years what suddenly changes to make a 99 year old building which is not a heritage structure become one the next year? Should it be defined instead by a date of construction? What if that original building has been modified and renovated over the years? Should it instead be a building with specific historic ties such as a notable resident? Can it be defined by looks? That line of questioning is essentially infinite and does not necessarily lead anywhere productive - though it often leads to heated debate - as it is not truly quantifiable. This is where human nature starts to enter this picture.

What if instead we set that question aside for the moment and assume we have some sort of a satisfactory definition of what a heritage building is. The question now is which do we protect, which do we replace, and which do we leave it up to the market to decide. Attempting to come up with those sorts of criteria for what stays and what goes is to enter another rabbit hole of human emotion competing against socioeconomic and environmental realities.

This is however a question that must be answered. It must be an answer that takes into account the competing human, social, economic and environmental realities and balances them as best as is possible. It also must evolve with changing patterns in those competing realms of reality.

In reality this is actually a process that is happening around us all the time. Most if not all communities will have some sort of a development plan that tries to take into account these factors, some better than others.

As was discussed in class the way it usually works is that city planners work on these issues behind the scenes and come up with a set of goals and a plan of action to achieve them through zoning changes, infrastructure projects, and development incentives. They will then put this plan to the public in the form of an open consultation and take any comments from interested parties about how the plan could better address issues they feel strongly about. They then take these comments and examine them, weighing them against the findings of the planning professionals and economists. Changes are then made and the plan is put back to the public again, and the process is repeated some number of times before a master plan is made and set in action.

It is a process that must have a finite end in order to ever achieve anything, however it is an indefinite process in the sense that the plans should be revisited frequently to update them for changes in any of the parameters it is using to project into the future. It is difficult to conceive of another reasonable way this process could function.

We live in a society made up of individual humans with individual views of the world, how it works and how the future should be managed. We also however live in a world of social, economic and environmental realities that can be quantified in some sense and by which we must abide. This is the situation we are all in, and while there will never be a balance of those that satisfies everyone, we must strive to find the least worst outcome for all.