The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes As Public History by Dolores Hayden Paperback - 320 pages 2nd edition (April 1997) MIT Press ISBN: 0262581523 Check price and buy it at: amazon.com (USA) , amazon.co.uk (UK)

Book Description

The Power of Place is a well-timed, well-reasoned call for fusing history and the environment to create a more democratic and inclusive interpretation of the places in which most of us live and work. Ms. Hayden greatly strengthens preservation with arguments that give the historic environment a critical dimension beyond beauty and rarity." -- The New York Times Book Review

Based on her extensive experience in the urban communities of Los Angeles, historian and architect Dolores Hayden proposes new perspectives on gender, race, and ethnicity to broaden the practice of public history and public art, enlarge urban preservation, and reorient the writing of urban history to spatial struggles.

In the first part of The Power of Place, Hayden outlines the elements of a social history of urban space to connect people's lives and livelihoods to the urban landscape as it changes over time. She then explores how communities and professionals can tap the power of historic urban landscapes to nurture public memory.

The second part documents a decade of research and practice by Urban Landscapes As Public History: The Power of Place, a nonprofit organization Hayden founded in downtown Los Angeles. Through public meetings, walking tours, artists's books, and permanent public sculpture, as well as architectural preservation, teams of historians, designers, planners, and artists worked together to understand, preserve, and commemorate urban landscape history as African American, Latina, and Asian American families have experienced it.

One project celebrates the urban homestead of Biddy Mason, an African American ex-slave and midwife active betwen 1856 and 1891. Another reinterprets the Embassy Theater where Rose Pesotta, Luisa Moreno, and Josefina Fierro de Bright organized Latina dressmakers and cannery workers in the 1930s and 1940s. A third chapter tells the story of a historic district where Japanese American family businesses flourished from the 1890s to the 1940s. Each project deals with bitter memories -- slavery, repatriation, internment -- but shows how citizens survived and persevered to build an urban life for themselves, their families, and their communities.

Drawing on many similar efforts around the United States, from New York to Charleston, Seattle to Cincinnati, Hayden finds a broad new movement across urban preservation, public history, and public art to accept American diversity at the heart of the vernacular urban landscape. She provides dozens of models for creative urban history projects in cities and towns across the country.

About the Author

Dolores Hayden is Professor of Architecture, Urbanism, and American Studies at Yale University. Her previous books include The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities; and Redesigning the American Dream: The Future of Housing, Work, and Family Life.

Customer Reviews

The Power of Place in Planning, November 14, 2001
Reviewer: Michael Bufalino (California)
The Historical Perspective:

Hayden is an urban historian; she is concerned with the interpretation of historic places, people, movements and events. She specifically writes about woman's and ethnic histories in urban places. The Power of Place documents both a preservation project and the history to be preserved.

Hayden is involved in a relatively new movement of historians and geographers who are reexamining the use of space by society. Her geographic-historical perspective is reflected in many contemporary scholars, including Michael Dear, Jennifer Wolch, David Harvey, and Henri Lefebver.

Relevance to Planning and Urban Design:

Planners involved in historic preservation should understand that the historic preservation of the architecture and histories of multiple classes, ethnicities, and genders is important. Urban renewal and economic development is a powerful tool that can cleanse the landscape of any references to past inhabitants -- their struggles, lives, and uses of place. As we see with the Biddy Mason wall, good design can acknowledge the existence of previous uses even if no structure remains. With this in mind, there is a considerable amount of history yet to be acknowledged with appropriate monuments. So Hayden defines the power of place as: "The Power of ordinary urban landscape to nurture citizens' public memory, to encompass shared time in the form of shared memory".

A must read for urban planners involved in historic preservation.

Nuanced Spatial Critique, March 26, 2000
Reviewer: A reader
Dolores Hayden's book, The Power of Place, is a comprehensive guide for anyone whose goal is to engage in an examination of spaces and places. It retains a historical perspective that allows the reader to apply the places focused upon by Hayden to his or her own specific spatial examination. While she focuses specific attention on the Los Angeles area, I found her work compatible with any examination of spatial use or spatial history and contextualization. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the power of place.

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