Historic preservation aims to protect neighborhood character and community identity, yet the frameworks through which the designation operates may inadvertently accelerate the loss of the affordable housing that sustained the historically working-class communities whose labor and ingenuity created the neighborhoods now celebrated. This essay examines that tension through city-level analysis and detailed examination of three National Register historic districts in Chicago—Pilsen, East Ravenswood, and Wicker Park—combining longitudinal census tract data, matched-comparison analysis, and building typology evidence to distinguish between population loss, housing dedensification, and racial and economic displacement as separable but interrelated processes. Findings reveal that across all three districts, the share of two-unit and three- to four-unit buildings declined faster within designated boundaries than in matched controls, while larger multifamily structures expanded in both designated and non-designated tracts, indicating a broader market shift that designation accelerated but did not create. Citywide, designated tracts showed statistically significant smaller declines in White population share and larger declines in Black population share than matched controls between 1990 and 2020, even after controlling for 1990 baseline characteristics. National Register frameworks direct federal tax incentives toward architecturally intact structures while leaving the broader building stock unprotected. Local landmark review governs façade appearance but not unit counts. And the interaction of historic district status with RT and RS-3 zoning makes demolition of modest multifamily buildings economically rational in ways that designation cannot counteract. As cities nationwide expand historic districts while grappling with housing crises, this analysis offers a replicable framework and a direct challenge to preservation practice. Until designation is evaluated against housing function alongside architectural form, it will continue to correlate with the erasure of the affordable fabric it claims to protect.
In Canada, the first courses in heritage conservation were created in the early 1980s. Initially rooted in the disciplines of architecture and architectural history, heritage conservation education (HCE) has broadened its outreach over the past decades to include different expertise such as planning, engineering, and management. Currently, Canadian heritage conservation education comprises courses, programs, streams, and formal and informal training and learning opportunities. Existing courses and programs offer a broad range of knowledge and skillsets including crafts, planning, design, management, and adaptation among others. This article discusses how and why heritage conservation learning and training have changed in Canada. Unlike in the United States, the history of Canadian heritage conservation has yet to be written. Unsurprisingly, there is no overview of the evolution of HCE available to this day. Based on a series of interviews with key players in the Canadian heritage sector, the authors review the milestone moments that helped to shape the current landscape of HCE in the country. The article also reflects upon the future of HCE in Canada in view of the changes in professional practice and beyond. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action, and climate change matters more broadly, have seriously impacted the way heritage is viewed and transformed the role it can play in socioeconomic and environmental policies in Canada, all of which making this reflection timely. Building on their collaborative work within the National Roundtable on Heritage Education—including the drafting of its strategic plan in 2020 and a survey of place-based heritage programs—the authors share their views on the gaps, needs and opportunities for the heritage conservation education sector to fulfill its mission to prepare future generations of heritage professionals.
In the 1930s, the Historic American Buildings Survey institutionalized the field notebook as a tool for informal “data” collection during site visits. District offices deposited notebooks as part of the Library of Congress’s permanent public records. Architects’ field notebooks initiated the recording of the nation’s cultural history which was motivated by the organization’s mission to “study, measure, and draw up the plans, elevations and details of the important antique buildings of the United States” so that “they should not pass into unrecorded oblivion.” At first glance, the HABS drawings appear to present self-evident “data” portraying existing buildings in measured outlines, profiles, surfaces, and construction details. Yet architectural drawing is a creative, iterative, and inventive process, even when applied to the recording of historical buildings. When we look at the trail of drawings left behind from the process of recording the built environment, what exactly are we looking at? This study identifies specific techniques present in the drawing process that indicate the architects’ figuration of the facts and the active transfiguration of eyewitness observations into measured images. How architects made measurements, created points, lines, and grids, calculated the congruences between building parts, and made compositional choices, omissions, fabrications, restorations, and rectifications will be discerned from the drawing phases in the Library of Congress’s permanent collection. Close comparisons of field notebook sketches by different district offices include examinations of a log house in California, a Virginia farm’s slave quarters, Spanish colonial missions in Arizona, and a fishing village in Massachusetts alongside the final drawing records of each site. Looking closely will bring into focus how the resultant images display pensive and interpretive qualities in addition to the intended “data” collected. Through the architect’s figuration of an existing building into images it becomes understood as a form of construction and conceptualized as a historical subject. This close reading of images calls attention to the intelligence inherent in architectural drawing as a unique form of visual record making that undergirds heritage recording. This study also prompts critical reflection on the wider history of heritage documentation and the images that continue to shape our understanding of the built environment.
