Diversity in Preservation: Rethinking Standards and Practices

A t the 1993 national preservation Conference in st. Louis, i did my first presentation on diversity in preservation in a session that sought to answer the question: How do we get more people of color and inner-city dwellers involved in preservation? My answer was: Wrong question. They are involved. i chronicled a long list of efforts by Landmarks illinois in Chicago to that date, including my experience with the north Kenwood community, which i wrote about in the Future Anterior journal in 2005. The question was more appropriately, how do we integrate our efforts with theirs? This is the same question national Trust president stephanie Meeks has been asking more recently—how do we reach out to local preservationists? Those efforts i chronicled on the south and West sides of Chicago in the 1980s and 1990s were limited by preservation standards like integrity and practices that focused on architectural design. Twenty years later, as vice-chair of the national Trust’s Diversity Task Force, i have been working with the national park service to identify how standards and practices might be changed to recognize more diverse historic sites. in particular we need to consider how integrity is determined; how the period of significance is defined; and how the secretary of the interior’s standards are applied.