Context 163 - March 2020

C O N T E X T 1 6 3 : M A R C H 2 0 2 0 57 into the snows of Yosemite with Muir in 1903. Theodore Roosevelt also set up the government Reclamation Service, which created and implemented water supply and electricity generation projects such as the Hoover and Grand Coulee dams, the precursors of other massive, state-sponsored infrastructure projects. One of the greatest drivers of government-sponsored change was the second world war. It drove advances in science and industrial production, all hugely funded by government. After the war President Eisenhower’s Interstate Highways Act of 1956 changed America profoundly, opening up new settlements and suburbs, and modernising a previously underdeveloped road system.Wray shows that the early vision of the internet also had its first stirrings in the years after the second world war and the promotion of state- sponsored science by the visionary innovator Vannevar Bush. The other great driver of change was the Apollo moon landing programme, for which only the state could have met the cost and shouldered the huge risks involved. Crucial to the success of the programme was the development of the miniature Apollo guidance computer. Although primitive by modern standards, the advance in computer science that it triggered was a world-changing spinoff from the Apollo programme. In the field of city planningWray charts the move from privately sponsored city plans in Chicago in the early years of the 20th century to the later state-sponsored plans of NewYork. There the towering figure was Robert Moses. Beginning with the development of state parks he moved on to planning roads to ease congestion in NewYork City. Driven and sometimes brutally confrontational, Moses pushed through huge building programmes, including the Triborough and Verrazano Narrows bridges. No Little Plans is an effective critique of an economic and political orthodoxy.What can we as building conservation professionals take away from it? Perhaps that our mixture of public funding, regulation and support with private investment and expertise is more powerful than we thought. Michael Taylor is editorial coordinator for Context Convoluted arguments Securing Urban Heritage: agents, access, and securitization Edited by Heike Oevermann and Eszter Gantner, Routledge, 2019, 216 pages, 25 illustrations in black and white, ISBN 978 0 429053 55 9, £120 What is this book? Is it about urban conservation, making historic spaces safe in troubling times, or ensuring broad access to the historic environment for a range of different groups with different purposes? This slim but dense academic volume of essays takes on the ambitious challenge of bringing these three different themes into a coherent whole with a broad selection of cases from across the globe. For the Anglo-Saxon practitioner, the reader has first to work through language and terminology that will be unfamiliar, occasionally confusing and frequently multi- layered in its meaning. For European colleagues, more used to working with academia and translating seemingly nebulous concepts into practical projects, the book will provide helpful insights, but its breadth of ambition counterintuitively limits its use. On a grander scale, the book does plough a furrow into which future seeds will be planted. A great deal of further work is needed on sustainable approaches to urban conservation, in particular on fundamental questions around how it can be effectively integrated into city management (and, in a UK context, on how this benefits municipalities that have been pared to the bone by a decade of austerity). The nearest this volume comes to addressing that question is, first, in the case study concerning Kyoto City and Osaka. In spite of concepts of impermanence in Japanese approaches to conservation, it notes that conservation is, in effect, integrated into the country’s culture. Second, a number of the contributions touch on the question of values – an approach which creates opportunities for cross-cutting objectives. Although the case study concerning urban nuclear reactors is perhaps somewhat extreme, it neatly encapsulates the challenges around changing values and related uses, while Dennis Rodwell considers values-based conservation in more everyday situations. The case study of St Denis in northern Paris starts to tackle the challenge of how engaging with dissonant heritage narratives can create misunderstanding and, if poorly handled, end up excluding rather than including. To this reviewer, the book can not succeed in its aim of bringing together questions of conservation, access and actors into a coherent framework – perhaps because of the ambition and diversity of the case studies, or because of the inaccessible language, which caters to an academic audience. The result is a series of complex and somewhat convoluted arguments that are worth dipping in to when the reader has time and space to carefully consider what lessons might be drawn for their