Cities Lein-ing into Design Guidelines for Preservation & Resilience
This lecture interrogates local preservation laws that regulate design of the built environment and introduces replications in local mitigation policies designed to render real estate resilient. Drawing on research of New Orleans’s and Philadelphia’s laws and policies, this discussion of statutory design standards for historic real estate questions the incorporation of architecture into punitive (i.e. tax liens) and prescriptive (i.e. legal covenants) planning for historic resources to recover from disasters and disinvestment. Although incentivization of preservation with legal and financial instruments is not new or novel, cities doing so while claiming diversity, equity and inclusion in law and policymaking is. New efforts to reconcile established regulatory practices with emergent reparative praxis will conclude the lecture.
Dr. Fallon Samuels Aidoo is Assistant Professor of Real Estate & Historic Preservation at Tulane University. As a preservation planner, she is interested in both the history and future of real estate that sustains cultures, economies, ecologies, and memories. Her research and teaching of design and development builds knowledge of real estate reinvestment, restoration, rehabilitation, and retrofit by governmental, private, philanthropic, and nonprofit organizations—and the lack thereof in places predominantly occupied by Black, Indigenous, and immigrant populations. These analyses of preservation policy and practice appear in the Journal of Environmental Studies & Science, Preservation & Social Inclusion, Spatializing Politics: Essays on Power & Place, and several forthcoming edited volumes: Discussions of Architectural Theory, the Routledge Handbook on Cultural Heritage and Disaster Risk Management, Future Anterior: An International Journal of Historic Preservation History, Theory and Criticism. Her investigations also yield heritage nominations, Historic Context Statements, and NHPA Section 106 Reviews, most recently for FEMA. Both as a professor and as founding principal of studioRxP, Dr. Aidoo advances equity and justice in preservation amongst governments (e.g. Louisiana National register Review Committee,), nonprofits (e.g. Louisiana Landmarks Society Trustee), professional associations (e.g. ACSP Anti-Racism Task Force, 2021-), peer universities (e.g. Ryerson U). For clients such as the African American Heritage Trail of Martha’s Vineyard, she has secured grants from the National Trust for Historic Preservation as well as state and federal agencies. At Tulane School of Architecture, Dr. Aidoo teaches design and research studios in real estate development and historic preservation. She recently held an endowed professorship in Historic Preservation as Assistant Professor of Planning & Urban Studies at the University of New Orleans. She previously taught architecture and urbanism at Northeastern University, Harvard, and MIT while researching hazards to historic structures for VREF, AECOM, DMJM. Dr. Aidoo holds a PhD in urban planning (Harvard), M.S. in architectural history (MIT) and B.S. in civil/structural engineering (Columbia University).
