Motives
Early preservation efforts were driven by patriotism and a desire to protect the new establishment of the nation by wealthy, private individuals. Early efforts focused primarily on individual stuctures as opposed to areas such as a neighborhood in a city or a rural landscape. The preserved stuctures were often turned into museums to create a showcase and generate tourism. The focus of preservation eventually shifted from patriotism to the aesthetics of a structure or area and ultimately to the their structural relationships with society at large. Today, individuals and groups in a community work towards preservation as a whole. According to Dr. Robin Elizabeth Datel, modern motivations for preservation can be summed up in four points:
- to retain diverse elements of past
- to perpetuate the distinctive identities of places
- to involve amateurs in landscape care
- to practice a conservation approach to environmental change.
The economic benefits of preservation continue to become more important and better understood and documented. Preservation efforts produce the most number of jobs in the nation’s economy and these jobs create new businesses and tourism, increase property values, and enhanced the quality of life in a community.
Read more about this topic: National Historic Preservation Act Of 1966
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—David Hume (1711–1776)