C O N T E X T 1 2 1 : S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 1 43 turned a major architectural project into a theatrical celebrity controversy; and which, instead of dampening the phenomenon, fuelled it. Glendinning is strident in his critique of Edinburgh’s attempt to ‘brand Scotland’, namely Eric Miralles’ Scottish Parliament, with its ‘randomly-gathered metaphorical references – leaves, boat-hulls, sails, mountain crags and so forth’, and the atmosphere of chaos that characterises the completed building and which, as with Sydney, surrounded the design process and project budget. Glendinning berates the loss of direction of an architectural world whose scope has shrunk from involvement in the built environment as a whole to a focus on imagemaking city centre and waterfront developments. He is thus highly critical of the assertive and feted individualism of today’s practising ‘starchitects’ (Will Alsop and Frank Gehry are among those chastised), with their arbitrarily flamboyant buildings that are disconnected from their visual and social context. In the UK, Glendinning explains this disengagement of architects from the environments in which the majority of citizens conduct their daily lives: from the collective welfaresocialism of the 1950s and ’60s, through Thatcherite neo-capitalism, to the cult of the media-hyped star personality that developed under New Labour. Architecture’s Evil Empire? is not merely a critique. Glendinning, while fully recognising the extent of the challenge, seeks a way out of this age of ‘unrestrained architectural extremism’, to an architecture that adapts its modern movement roots to an environmentally and socially responsible capitalism; one that stabilises and reunites. He advocates ‘urban cohesion’, ‘joined-up planning’ at both the macro and micro scales, and ‘ennoblement of the generic’: regenerate cities slowly and carefully; integrate with what is good about what was there before; remedy the tragically alienated state of contemporary architecture; and stop showing off. ‘The issue,’ Glendinning writes, ‘is much more one of planning than just architecture.We need to establish flexible frameworks of planned coordination within cities and regions that steer between the alienating planning megalomania of Old Modernism and the scenographic fundamentalism of New Urbanism, with the aim of embedding individual developments in a sense of place.’ His conclusion is that today’s global modernism is not so much evil as deeply flawed.Would that it were not a Greek tragedy; rather, a Whitehall farce. Architecture’s Evil Empire? offers informed articulation of what many have been thinking and saying for at least a decade. This includes whether it is not just architects who are responsible for a global phenomenon that has many of the characteristics of a colossal practical joke. Dennis Rodwell, architect-planner, consultant in cultural heritage and sustainable urban development Intangible heritage Beyond Preservation: using public history to revitalize inner cities Andrew Hurley,Temple University Press, 2010, 248 pp, softcover, ISBN 978 1 4399 0229 5, £19.99; hardcover, ISBN 978 1 4399 0228 8, £60 Beyond Preservation is a reflection on established models of urban regeneration, their dependence on financial incentives and investment from outside leading to gentrification, and the rebranding of inner city neighbourhoods as historic districts dominated by leisure and tourism functions. Whereas Hurley applauds the beneficial effects of this process in the refurbishment of individual buildings, he questions the measurement of success according to economic criteria at the expense of a shared civic vision. He highlights the potential of heritage-led regeneration to contribute to social cohesion and sustainable communities, while stating: ‘at its worst, it operates as a mechanism of capitalist opportunism and aggravates social tensions by pricing the poor out of their own neighbourhoods’. Professor of history at the University of Missouri-St Louis, Hurley explores this not-unfamiliar thesis from the perspective of his discipline, and the role that a better understanding of urban history and the functional and cultural layering of urban society can play in supporting genuinely inclusive urban regeneration. His central argument is that public interpretation at grass-roots level, engaging with the human stories of a neighbourhood, offers the best means to give meaning to the buildings and spaces that make up the historic environment, thereby reinforcing sense of place. A central theme is ‘history that matters’, and the potential of urban conservation to enrich people’s lives – in the broad community sense rather than the narrow financial one. The case studies in Beyond Preservation address inner-city neighbourhoods in the United States, a factor which should not discourage the readership of Context. Described as a ‘useful primer in communityhistory practice’, much of Hurley’s research highlights the challenge of bridging the divide between academic scholarship and community perceptions. In short, of reaching a consensus in historical interpretation across professional, ethnic, racial and class divides – a challenge that is much the same in today’s inner cities on both sides of the Atlantic. Beyond Preservation presents strong advocacy for bottom-up community engagement in the processes of urban regeneration. It does so through the eyes of a historian who seeks to foster a shared sense of purpose and belonging in the historic environment – not simply for its past, but for its present and in shaping a community’s vision for the future. Beyond Preservation is recommended for the contribution it makes to articulating the connections between the politics and practice of heritageled urban regeneration and sustainable communities: not as separate concepts but as inseparable ones. The book’s thesis resonates strongly with today’s shift in focus from tangible to intangible heritage, and the expansion in the spectrum of values and criteria that should be used in appraising the historic environment, and it makes a strong plea for the role that urban historians can perform in this process. Dennis Rodwell
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