Urban Conservation: Shadows of the Past..

Shadows of the Past

“In the end we will conserve only what we love; we will love only what we understand; and we will understand only what we are taught” - Baba Dioum

Everything about me is reduced, discolored, broken, beaten and bruised.

I am not the strong, confident, pillar of strength I was in the past.

The youth that once flowed deep within me, warming my soul, I forever gone, like a feather blowing in the wind, moving more swiftly than I my dwindling reflexes an bare.

No vacancy, No vending, No soliciting, No trespassing

So many rules to follow, yet I am too weak to care, too frail to raise protest, too fearful, too timid, too intimidated to state my true feelings.

You have no idea what I once was, you can’t act like you understand because you cannot possibly conceptualize how great I once stood.

You stupid child, telling me what to do, where to go, how to live my life!

It is you who have made me this way, you have ruined me by remaining impartial, indifferent, and unconcerned with the pile of waste I have become.

No one to hear my stories, no one to know my history, no one to care about my experiences, no one to learn from my past transgressions.

                                      My life is reduced to speculation, opinion, inference, suggestion.

For God’s sake get these plastic bandages off of me!

 Can’t you see they’re bruising me, discoloring what was once a clean, smooth surface?

Itchy leaves, scratching all over…

No room to breathe in this compound, any hope I had of fresh air has been boarded up with these flimsy pieces of wood...My lungs are burning in desperation

Bone on bone, grinding away at the joints, bucking under the weight of what little bodyweight I still have…

Gates forever closed, paint forever pealing and fading and chipping away.

 Not much different from my soul,

At least now my outsides are consistent with my insides….

(i)            I took this picture while by brother was driving backward along the Queen’s Park Savannah (sorry for any lives we may have endangered that day). This building is one of Trinidad’s Magnificent Seven, the Mille Fleurs building…sound’s grand doesn’t it? Well here it is for you…in all its…magnificence?

the Mille Fleurs: Past vs. Present

I want to talk today about ‘conserving urban landscapes’. Hall and Barrett in their book Urban Geography talks about this in Ch. 6. Now, at first glance I thought exactly what any weary student like myself would think: “Not another reading about saving the goddamned environment!!!”  (of course all I read was the word ‘conserving’)

Now, please don’t be confused, I know I’m doing geography but there’s only so much I can read about conserving the environment...And I guess it’s that kind of attitude that has the world in the quandary it’s in today....but alas, that is a different topic for a different day.

(ii)               For now I’ll start with a brief explanation about what the idea of conserving urban landscapes. According to Hall and Barrett, conserving the past has been a long intellectual tradition, involving the desire to preserve particular monuments and buildings within a country. I talked before in a previous post about the idea of planned cities and the fact that it assumed rationality, predictability and in sum squashed all human essence of the urban. This topic is also from the same chapter, and I find it extremely interesting as it advocates for the complete opposite. Urban conservation aims at preserving those same irrational, emotion-driven and human aspects of an urban landscape that planned cities aimed at toppling and simply rebuilding in a more ordered way.

Now, if you’re a frequent reader, you’ll know I’m quite passionate when it comes to preserving personal identity, culture and the importance of distinguishing those innate, and indigenous elements of an area against foreign inevitable intrusions. Hall and Barrett also write passionately about justification for conserving buildings within a city, core to its identity. They speak of intellectual, psychological and financial rationales for conservation efforts:

Tradition	Description
Intellectual Tradition	The idea that buildings should be retained for their artistic, architectural or historical qualities and therefore for the role which these buildings serve in illuminating the cultural elements of a society.
Psychological Tradition	Linked to the reactions to the increasing pace and scale of urban change. Here, loss of urban environments through redevelopment leads to ‘future shock’ (Toffler 1970) where residents feel a sense of dislocation from the urban.
Financial Tradition	The idea that urban conservation activities can have economic benefits stemming from using conserved buildings in contemporary development.

It is important to note however, especially in terms of the financial tradition that urban conservation efforts can be seen in light of the financial burden they may cause a city. Much has been written about the burdens associated with building conservation. For example, the cost of maintaining buildings, use of specialized building materials and expertise and replacing outdated structures and foundations can be seen as a bother to a fast pace and dynamically changing modern city. One example of the bother of conserving buildings is the Queen’s Royal College in Port of Spain, also one of the Magnificent Seven buildings. The project was contracted to Kee Chanona Ltd for $34.5 million and restoration work began in January 2007. It is now 2013 and If I recall the project took about 3-4 years to complete entirely. I will say now however, that the building is absolutely beautiful. The question remains however, which is more profitable? Was rebuilding the QRC worth it? or should they have just scrapped it and built a new school with modern architectural designs.

Renovated: Queen's Royal College

 In my opinion, our sense of place, our culture, our heritage matters more. I feel like in such a fast-pace world, full of wealth and prosperity we are far too eager to forget the past, forget our history and simply move on toward a brighter future.  How can we have future generations that know nothing about the stories out cities have to tell? Stories of struggle, of freedom, stories of pain and sorrow, of joy and hope. We much appreciate our past…we must fight to protect it and conserve it no matter what cost. There are so many buildings in Trinidad that have such rich history, but a laid waste against a backdrop of modernized structures.

 Four surviving buildings from before WWII in Warsaw, Poland.
 A prime example of how easily people opt to destroy culturally saturated monuments.Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2013/01/31/plans-to-destroy-prewar-building-in-former-warsaw-ghetto-set-off-struggle-to/#ixzz2P9NYkUKh

On a final note I implore you, see the value in the old, the vintage, the antique…not only buildings, but the elderly. We live in an individualistic society, a Western-influenced society, quick to push aside those who are of no use to us. We stand alone, look out for ourselves. But this attitude will get us nowhere. If we damage and mistreat, if we forget where who our ancestors are, what they fought for, how can we ever hope to move forward.

Appreciate your past…or be lost to a sad and meaningless life, a lack of identity and no place to call home…your past is your future, look to it or lose it.

Legislation according to the Government of India, Archaeological Survey http://www.asiguwahaticircle.gov.in/legislations.html

(iii)               A few links to take a look at:

-          An article from the Guardian Newspaper talking about the conservation of buildings like the Mille Fleurs.

http://guardian.co.tt/news/2013-02-02/more-calls-action-magnificent-7

-          The website for the ‘Citizens for Conservation, Trinidad and Tobago’, a local conservation activist group

 http://citizensforconservationtt.org/main/index.php/builtherit/magnificent-seven/122-mille-fleurs

-          Another article from the Guardian Newspaper about restoration work being done on the President’s House

http://guardian.co.tt/news/2012-03-26/govt-focuses-magnificent-seven-president%E2%80%99s-house