CONCLUSION

CONCLUSION

Through the work of eight researchers over three months, a portrait of Poughkeepsie emerges that is framed by uneven narratives and ambiguous trajectories. Poughkeepsie’s Main Street cityscape is significant because of the transformations it has witnessed, the trials it has suffered, and the people for whom it provides a home and an economic hub today. However fractured or stigmatized, Main Street shelters vibrant communities who are proud to call Poughkeepsie home.

This studio has endeavored to dematerialize the traditional voice of preservation in order to more fully embrace a broad range of tactics by which preservation can aspire to better serve society at large. In anticipation and embrace of inevitable change, the preservation perspective is strengthened and made more relevant by experiments such as these to explore pathways towards creative valorization of relationships to the built environment.

In tackling questions of the roles preservation might play in promoting social inclusion, economic vitality, and preventing displacement, this studio asserts the following:

• Through a DEEP CONSIDERATION OF SPATIAL

HISTORIES, preservation contributes an important analytic perspective that should not be undervalued.

Investigating and synthesizing the causes of current conditions in the built environment is vital to integrate lessons of the past in plans for improved futures.

• Towards the AMPLIFICATION OF DIVERSE

NARRATIVES, preservation can engage a variety of communities by charting historical connection to place.

This is not just a gesture. Creating spaces of official or collective acknowledgment of lesser-known narratives can be leveraged to generate political and infrastructural safeguards against inequity. • And thus, preservation can offer important avenues towards VALORIZING COLLECTIVE AGENCY.

The preservation skill set for assessing value and developing policy to safeguard resources at the scale of neighborhoods are already important mechanisms for collective action in the free market. To more intentionally craft this role towards agendas of justice, preservationists can and should more profoundly acknowledge that built and social fabrics are embedded within ever-shifting political and economic structures of power.

Preservation provides a robust pairing of formal-structural and socio-cultural analyses—perspectives that are often understood apart from one another. Through the analyses and proposals articulated here, this studio has endeavored to demonstrate the mutual productivity of these perspectives as dynamic endeavors, demanding a praxis of multivalent attentions rather than mere curation. It is this dynamism of creative stewardship practice that ensures the utility of our material-cultural past.