The story of what happened in Society Hill has long been regarded by planners as a watershed moment for American cities. By renovating its dilapidated housing stock, Bacon demonstrated that historic preservation could be a powerful economic-development tool, one that has guided Philadelphia's slow but steady revival for half a century.
That narrative is now being challenged in some unlikely intellectual corners. Rather than helping our cities recover their bearings, historic preservation is strangling them, the revisionists assert. They blame our sentimental affection for old buildings for everything from sky-high rents to the economic whupping the United States has taken from China.
This argument comes not from a lone crank, but two of the most respected thinkers in their fields: Pritzker Prize-winning architect Rem Koolhaas and Harvard University economist Edward Glaeser.
These are not two guys you would normally expect to find at the same party. Koolhaas is the cooler-than-cool, leftist provocateur best known for designing the Seattle Public Library and the Prada "Epicenter" in New York's SoHo. Glaeser, who will address the Philadelphia chapter of the Urban Land Institute June 14 at the Union League, is a wonky free-marketeer who just published an unlikely celebration of urban centers called Triumph of the City.
Overall, Glaeser's book is a welcome corrective to Robert Bruegmann's 2005 free-market defense of sprawl. Glaeser, by contrast, believes cities have a built-in competitive advantage because their dense, diverse concentrations of people create the perfect ecosystem for generating new ideas and new businesses, and doing it in the most efficient way possible.
