Change is what happens to cities if they are not to become lifeless monuments to themselves. A living city has to strike some sort of balance between avoiding the strangulation and depopulation that happens when you conserve everything, and the visual slurry that occurs if you let developers do what they like. That’s why Britain has listing systems, ensuring that the best of each era is saved from destruction. But this can cause some ironies – since the 1990s, scores of modernist buildings have been listed. These are often the very same buildings that the Victorian nostalgists who dominate local newspaper comment sections blame for ruining their towns.
The result has been a new tension between different notions of conservation. This is a tension that serves mainly to benefit property developers, who can make money both from new buildings, and as “saviours” of great modern buildings at the cost of destroying their original purely social purpose, as has happened in the privatisation of London’s Keeling House or Sheffield’s Park Hill.
