Javier Ors Ausín (MDes CC ’17) along with Euneika Rogers-Sipp (Loeb Fellow ‘16), Brent Leggs (Loeb Fellow ‘11), Ramon La Roche (University of South Carolina), and Stephanie E. Yuhl (Professor at the College of the Holy Cross) led the panel under the title ‘Historic Preservation as Social (In)Justice: The Need for a New Economy of Place’. The panel was part of the Slave Dwelling Project Conference that took place between the 19th and the 21st of September in Columbia, SC.
Ors Ausín presented research that he, along with Dana McKinney (MArch-MUP ’17), Megan Mahala Echols (MUP ’17) and Guan Min (MDes CC ’17) undertook last year at Harvard’s Critical Conservation program, under the supervision of professors Susan Nigra Snyder and George E. Thomas.
The panel carried forward the case study of Charleston, South Carolina, celebrated as a leader in historic preservation and a global tourist attraction. The panelists analyzed and unpacked how power and politics play a critical and often undisclosed influence in shaping the built environment and historic preservation districts in North America. Through a multidisciplinary dialogue, the speakers connected justice, historic preservation and civic place-making. They discussed how power was exercised in the Preservation Movement examining spatial patterns of exclusion aimed at suppressing racial, ethnic, economic, and religious differences, and the material character of Hegemonic Identity Cities. Presenters also detailed their public narratives and their attempts to reinterpret place by using contemporary historical constructs.
