Thriving activity, economic vitality, and historic "stuff" play well together.

How important are your historic places? And why should we care?

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As preservation and planning professionals, we’re frequently confronted with a problem:

How do you maintain a place as a growing focus of commercial and social life, while honoring and sustaining its character? (And in this climate, why should we care?)

Take Anytown, USA (or Canada/India/France). In Anytown, there is a passionate group of people who are convinced that their community’s historic properties are more than just relics.

The physical features of a place are key components of its historic, economic, and cultural fabric.

The physical features of a place are an integral part of its historic,  cultural, and economic fabric.

We’re talking about smart folks. They get it. They’re civic leaders, economic development people, architects, planners, Main Street Managers, merchants, and tourism folks.

Every day they are busy working to make their city, town, or neighborhood thrive. They want growth, investment, high occupancy, lots of business, lots of appeal, lots of people bustling about, and tons of creative ideas. They believe the best choice is to grow without becoming “Generictown.”

The best “preservation” treats it as a tool for economic development.

Thriving activity, economic vitality, and historic "stuff" play well together.

Thriving activity, economic vitality, and historic “stuff” play well together.

We’re not talking about hardcore, “don’t-touch-historic-stuff-at-any-cost” thinking. Typically that approach isn’t successful. Communities aren’t static. They’re like coral reefs, where evolution and change are part of the story. We’ll gain some and we’ll lose some, but we’ll always build on what we have and we can be smart about it.

Indeed, we’ve seen how historic properties are able to “play nice” amid many flavors of modern redevelopment activities. In the U.S. think Charleston, Santa Fe, New Orleans, Lawrence, Portland, Miami, plus thousands of towns, villages, and neighborhoods. Places with identifiable character where much of it is tangible and  architectural. Not to mention beautiful (or not). And unique, humble, impressive, plain, ornate, interesting, and filled with story.

Historic places are where you start.

The smart money says historic properties and districts are more than just physical expressions of shared heritage; they are the basis of a community’s future aspirations. They’re where you start. Historic places represent sustained investments over long periods. Investments that residents and city leadership have agreed are worth protecting (even when they weren’t “preservationists”). Places that somehow had enough of the right stuff to last a long time. Historic downtowns and neighborhoods shape the stage where generations of business owners, residents, civic leaders, professionals, and visitors have lived, met, done business, socialized, banked, worshiped, and engaged in the myriad of everyday activities that form the basis of every vital community.

So, how do you build a future on the unique character of place? How do you save the baby without tossing out the bathwater? What’s the best way to integrate all the stuff that’s been there a long time into all the stuff that is to come?

1. Know what you have.

RuskinARC works on iPads, tablets, and mobile devices.

RuskinARC works on iPads, tablets, etc.

Do the inventory. First step in any endeavor. You can’t plan if you don’t know what you’ve got. Every business, grocery store, and boot palace knows what it’s got “in house” and plans accordingly.

The architectural survey is designed to look at historic properties and tell you what you’ve got, when they got there, what shape they’re in, and where they are. Without this information, it’s tough to make good decisions.

But for years the field survey has been too hard to do. Too wrapped up in esoteric terms or expensive and closed systems. Too detached from the planning process, and thus detached from the economic development process.

We created RuskinARC to make architectural survey and inventory work easy and fast, without sacrificing any power or control. It works on mobile devices, in the field, at the office, wherever you are. Even we are impressed at what some places have done just in the past months.

2. Make your survey information usable.

Exports to GIS.

Exports to GIS.

Hate to say this, but preservationists need to get out of the newspapers. If you’ve got a good handle on your historic assets and flexible data, you’re ahead of the game instead of behind it. And the information should be easy to export, manage, and use. Your planners are going to need it. The GIS people are going to need it. The economic development folks need it, as well as analysts, real estate folks, project managers, property owners, researchers, architects, and others.

Point and click architectural surveys.

Point and click architectural surveys.

RuskinARC is a fabulous front end for collecting information about historic properties, but the back end is just as important. RuskinARC exports in seconds to GIS, Google Earth, Excel, plaintext, and more. Data, photos, attached files — the whole shebang. All keyed and nicely named for you. You can get a sense of this by trying it yourself. Get out with an iPad or tablet and give it a shot.

3. Put your historic places where people can find them!

Top: Uninteresting map of a historic district in my home town. Bottom: map in RuskinARC.

Top: Uninteresting map of a historic district in my home town! Bottom: interactive map with photos, in RuskinARC.

Online, please, where we can engage. And make it interactive. Lots of survey information is sitting around on shelves, in file cabinets, locked up in offices or in single computer systems, in PDFs or somebody’s Excel or Access database. You might have to drive down and ask the GIS guy for a map. Argh. I have looked at far too many lists of addresses with no map, no photos, no story. And half the time, there’s no accessibility at all. I live in Lexington, Kentucky where we have fourteen historic districts. Try to find some information about them online (in 2013!).

RuskinARC makes interactive maps, sortable lists, and image galleries. It lets you search by architect, construction date, function, eligibility, street, and more. It lets you manage boundaries for districts, zones, or overlays. It lets you attach files, plans, drawings, photos, narratives, or whatever you’ve got.

The last college group I talked to didn’t even blink: “If we can’t find it online, it either doesn’t exist or it’s not important.“

I hope that’s not the message we’re sending.

So, why should we care about something if it either doesn’t exist or is not important? How do we attract the creative planning and stewardship ideas? How do we broaden our audience, appeal to the public, show off our assets, AND satisfy planners, researchers, and GIS folks? We created RuskinARC to be that solution. RuskinARC’s platform makes it simple to put your historic “stuff” online where people can find it. It’s an easy, powerful, inexpensive way to do the fundamental inventory work, while making information about your historic buildings and districts accessible and interactive.

 

Feel free to call or email if you have questions.

 

 

The Place is Not the Story

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There are a number of ways to structure a story about great historic places. How you choose is going to be based on how much story you have to tell, and on how you are able to turn “data” into something richer and more appealing.

Picture1The first thing to remember is, the place is not the story. For instance, you may tell us how a building is the first skyscraper in Kentucky or a perfect example of Art Deco, but the short list of people who will care about those data points are architecture students and historians. What we care about are people, someone we can relate to personally. That should always be the main thread of your story, how this place affected people like me.

Stories of Place

Picture3Saying that, sometimes a place has so much history that you want to tell a story centered around it. The key is, make the story about the people that lived, worked and played there. Tell the story about the architect and how this place fits into his career, about the builders who labored for months, the original owners’ dreams for the building and how it was converted into a family-owned deli and how that helped the surrounding neighborhood prosper and grow. You can do that with RuskinARC while at the same time creating a powerful, rich repository of info about your places.

I call these “Stories of Place” and that place could be a building as well as a city. Just like in the movie “The Red Violin”, the story is about the people that changed and adapted the object over the years but the object itself is only important as the anchor for the story.

Stories of People

Picture4You could also tell a story about a certain person or group of people and how they affected a certain place. The first example here would be an architect or builder. It seems that every community has a resident architect that gave a part of the community a flavor not seen in any other part of the country. Tell us who that architect was, what their influences were, why they picked their certain style and how that affected the community around them. Show us all the places they designed or built and why each one matters to the people living in the community today.

This is also the story you would tell for famous individuals that lived in the community and where they did the work that made them famous. Tie your places back to something we know or care about and we’ll be much more interested in the places themselves.

Stories of Events

Picture2We all have events that have touched our lives and every community has them too. They could be something as simple as the story of the founding of a city or a disaster that left its mark that you can still see today or a triumph such as an invention or a disaster averted. All communities have these stories hidden away in their history and if you can bring them out and show how they affected the people living there, we will put ourselves in their shoes and imagine what it must have been like to live through it.

These are the stories that you’ll need to tell us if you want us to care about your community.

If you aren’t telling these kinds of stories to us today, get started!

Storytelling in Historic Preservation

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We here at CRE Planning and Development have been thinking a lot about how historic communities present themselves online. Many, we’ve found, have taken the approach of putting raw data online about their various historic resources. While this might satisfy experts in this field, it won’t bring the spark needed to gather the public’s interest. For that, you need a story.

videothumbFirst, let’s define some terms:

Data are the hard, raw facts. Three chimneys, brick walls, built in 1927, etc. Data is extremely important to experts and useless to nearly everyone else. RuskinARC lets you do gather that information easily, and much, much more.

Information means turning raw data into something else — story, knowledge, insight. This is the reason we built RuskinARC, to facilitate turning data into information. Give it your raw data and RuskinARC can give you a map of the buildings, what styles are common in the center of town, what parts were built first and which were added 30 years later. Here’s an example from Abilene, Texas. Information is vitally important to your work.

But your work is what brings sense to the information and transforms it into….

Storytelling

The public is going to be most interested in how people fit into all of this information and doing that is storytelling. I would contend that storytelling is the main reason you’re in this field, because you can look at the information and see a story in it, a rich history. You see ebbs and flows in the community’s economy and local influence, imagine what families went through living at different times within the community and how the people of a community shaped the current culture and character.

This is what people want to know about and what will get them excited about preserving that heritage. Public engagement. As a layman, I might not be too interested in the facts of the place, but we’re all human and if I can imagine the Civil War soldier running over the battlements to defend the west wall or picture the families on the stage coach rolling down Main street on their way to new homes west, or a soldier boarding the ship for his voyage to Normandy, I’m much more likely to be interested and truly care about the places where they lived and worked. Engagement requires empathy and you do that with your story, not with data or information. Your job is not only to see that story, but to communicate it to those who are prepared to protect your community or visit it and help it thrive.

Watch a quick video to get a better sense of what RuskinARC is working toward when it comes to storytelling:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6-rB1-XcAw

What do you think? How important is storytelling to your job?

 

RuskinARC upgrades, new features!

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Dear clients and friends of RuskinARC,

We’re starting the year off with a bang. RuskinARC is now better than ever for managing, mapping, and documenting your historic sites! It’s exciting to see all those great historic places mapped and managed online. Some projects are featured at www.ruskinarc.com – thanks to those who have let us showcase their historic architectural surveys and great places!

Major Improvements.

We wanted to make you aware of upgrades that will be rolled out on Sunday, December 16th, 2012. The improvements make RuskinARC work better in several important ways.

resource_summary_viewQuick summary of changes:

  1. New navigation — now condensed into smaller two top bars, allowing your sites to “shine” better onscreen.
  2. New “responsive” screen layout. RuskinARC will automatically fit itself to screens better, whether you or your visitors are on an iPad, a tablet, or a regular web browser with lots of room.
  3. Explanatory “titles” and helpful hints on what certain things mean.
  4. New “carousel” view that shows the photos of a historic resource when viewing its summary. There is a “detail” view for each historic site that prints out all the information recorded about it, but we want your visitors to get a better look at an individual building. More is coming on that, after this rollout.
  5. De-emphasis on language specific to the US National Register system. We’ve altered language here and there to accommodate other countries which may not use the exact terminology used in the States. We’ve done this while retaining all the utility for those using the US National Register system.
  6. Easier to enter the information you need. It’s now easier to “skip” certain bits of information if they don’t apply to what you’re doing. We did this by allowing sections of the page to open or close.
  7. Easier to make custom survey forms. Snappier back-end. Bugfixes. And much more.
  8. Most importantly…

edit_screen_partialRicher, more complete input.

Our most significant upgrade is offering more ways to record information, in better categories. For instance, you can now talk about whether or not a resource is open for tours, whether it’s for sale or rent, and whether or not it is endangered, and why.

All point and click.

RuskinARC has always worked on the principle that you are free to fill out the form as completely or incompletely as you wish, depending on your need. With the upgrades we can accommodate important needs that weren’t addressed before.
Examples:

Better location and map info.

map_view_satellite

  • Local place name for subdivisions, plats, blocks, and more.
  • Setting, Landscape, and Site Features
  • Acreage, parcel, land unit size
  • Quad/Map name and date
  • more…

You can now tell the ‘story’ by simply adding a Historical Summary.

This is a great way to engage interest beyond the details and description.

Endangered or Threatened?

Add notes, recommendations, contact information

Is it a tourism or featured destination?

Add Contact information, Hours, and Amenities

Is it for sale, rent, or lease?

Residential? Commercial? Mixed? Add remarks, comments, contact information, and notes.

Easier handling of architectural descriptions, with more detail, as needed.

Add simple notes on architectural style and distinguishing features
Use simple text in addition to detail fields.

Better ways to talk about eligibility and integrity.

A breakout on historic Significance and Context.

Theme, area(s) and period of significance.
Add a statement of significance as needed

Improved handling of secondary or ancillary structures.

Better handling of moves, alterations, additions, and modifications.

More…!

Thank you all.  Again, we look forward to hearing from you. Contact me any time.

– Glen Payne

 

 

Endangered Places Lists: The RuskinARC Way

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One of our most recent improvements to RuskinARC has been the addition of trial accounts that anyone can sign up for and use for small projects that they may have. One of the types of projects that we’ve been seeing a lot of people talk about lately is Endangered Places lists. We feel that it’s important to promote these fragile places as prominently as possible and try to get the story across about why these places are important to the heart and soul of the surrounding communities.

To help with that, we would like to extend an invitation to all communities to use our trial accounts to promote your Endangered Places and help tell their story.

Why RuskinARC?

We’ve seen Endangered Places lists in a couple of forms lately, including Facebook posts and Google Maps and all of them seem to be lacking a certain cohesiveness. It’s hard to get across the story of how these things are connected and what they mean, either because the Facebook post has no map and it’s hard to conceptualize where these place are or the Google Map doesn’t have images or good descriptions so it’s hard to tell what these places are.

RuskinARC is designed to tell the whole story, with maps, pictures and descriptions to give a whole sense of where these places are, what they mean and why they’re important to protect. We are currently working on features that will make that storytelling even more powerful, but we also think that RuskinARC is the best tool out there right now for sharing and showcasing this kind of preservation work.

How To…

As a little primer for setting up an endangered places list in RuskinARC, let me run you through some of the first steps.

First, sign up for a trial account. You can name the account whatever you want, but I would recommend just naming it whatever you call your endangered places list, say “The Richmond Fragile Fifteen” or “Raleigh’s Endangered Places”.

After you activate your account from the email we send you and log in, you’re put right into adding your first buildings. For best results,

  • Add pictures. Nothing tells a story of what a place means like pictures. Trial accounts are limited to two pictures for each place and we would recommend uploading a historic picture of the place and a picture of it now to add contrast of its change over time.
  • Fill out some of the historical and architectural details. Those fields are used to generate a description of the building when people look at the details of it. It also makes it easy to search for specific architects or time periods.
  • Fill out the Additional Description, Remarks, Significance section with the place’s story. This is the other important piece that builds the rich description for each building.

After adding five places, you’ll be taken back to the description of the last place you entered. To keep adding more, just click on the New Resource link in the top right menu.

Once you’re done adding them all, feel free to look at the map and image view to see how everything looks. If you’re happy with it, click the Settings link on the top right menu. This will allow you to change the Home Page Summary for the whole project, which will show on the Summary screen when people first visit. You can also set the project as Publicly Viewable, which will allow anyone to come and view your project (but they can’t edit it). After you save that, copy the web address and tell the world about it.

While it does take time to get them all in, we believe that the richness you get out of it and the story you can tell is very worth it, to you and to your community.

Give it a shot and let us know what you think.

New Features: Updated View Page

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We’ve just released a pretty big change to how buildings and sites are viewed. For the longest time, we’ve had what I like to call the data dump view; a large list of vitals that, while informative, wasn’t very pretty to look at. It’s something that is very useful for professional surveyors to view what kind of wall cladding material is in use and whether the windows are original or not, but for the average viewer, it didn’t concisely tell them what the building’s story was.

Details View

The Details View

In a step towards a more story-centric view of RuskinARC, we’ve come up with a new condensed view for all buildings and sites.

Story-Centric View

The Story-Centric View

By making the map, pictures and descriptive paragraph the central highlight on this page, we’ve showcased the most important pieces of what this building is about. Most of the details that are on the Detail View are also auto-built into the paragraph as well, so almost all the information entered is still there, just with a much more friendly way of seeing it. And all the detail information is still available through a Detail View button at the top of the screen, so nothing has been taken away.

We think this is much more accessible for a public view of the site and gives a much better view of the story of a building rather than just it’s vital statistics.

You can check out the new view and how it fits in with the rest of RuskinARC by viewing the Old West Lawrence District. If you have any comments or questions for us, feel free to comment below or contact us.

What’s Next for RuskinARC

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Just got through a meeting with everyone at CRE and we got to talking about what’s next with RuskinARC. We started a little more than a year ago and built what many have told us is the best professional historic survey management tool out there right now. But we’ve also heard ideas for the next steps and evolution of RuskinARC and we’re getting ready to move forward.

About a week ago, we put out a survey to gather what you would like to see next and the results have been very consistent so far; you want a top notch historic showcase tool, a place where you can really tell the story of your place. RuskinARC can already save vast amounts of vital information about your buildings, but you want something easier on the eyes for the public to take a look at what makes your community special. A place where you can tell your story.

Well, we hear you and we’re working to make that happen. We’ve got some ideas in our pockets that we think could revolutionize how people interact with historic communities and preservation leagues online. And if you are already a professional level user of RuskinARC, we can also tell you that you’ll get all of these improvements for free.

Yes, I know. Big words. But we’ve come this far with it and we’re sure going to give it all we’ve got.

If you’d like to send us your input, feel free to try out a trial account and then fill out our survey and give us your ideas.

We look forward to hearing from you.