Historic preservation is largely an urban profession with strong ties to city planning and development. Advocates tout preservation as a key driver of urban revitalization, but there remains a dearth of empirical research that addresses this intersection. This article reviews the current state of affairs in preservation practice and scholarship and builds new connections with four leading discourses in urban revitalization: the New American City, place matters, anchor institutions, and legacy cities. We call for an expansive research agenda to address preservation’s role in revitalization and to rethink preservation policy in the twenty-first century.

Historic preservation is common practice across the world, including in US cities. At the same time, population decline, economic distress and vacancy prevalent in declining cities, also known as legacy, shrinking or post-industrial cities, creates a pressing threat to a vast array of urban historic buildings. In the USA, recent planning and policy emphasises strategic demolition and/or targeting resources in potentially viable neighbourhoods, with little attention paid to historic preservation. To fill this gap, we use a comparative case study of federal historic rehabilitation tax credit (RTC) investments from 2000 to 2010 across the neighbourhoods of six legacy cities: Baltimore, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Providence, Richmond and St. Louis. This is the first study to use disaggregated, longitudinal RTC data to analyse investment at the neighbourhood scale. We use the Hirschman-Herfindahl Index to evaluate investment concentration and US Census 2000 data to characterise neighbourhoods where developers chose to undertake RTC projects. The findings show that RTC investments occurred across a wide range of places, including very lowand low-income neighbourhoods, and produced both market-rate and affordable housing across each city's neighbourhoods. The findings indicate that preservation occurs across a wide range of legacy city neighbourhoods and inform urban planners and policymakers about locations where the private sector is willing to invest with favourable financing.

Legacy cities are characterized by long-term, declining trends in both population and economic characteristics, but how these events translate to the neighborhood scale is less well understood. This research investigates the evolution of neighborhood types in four legacy cities—Baltimore, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and St. Louis—from 1970 to 2010. Working from a multidimensional framework of variables across five census decades, hierarchical cluster analysis and discriminant analysis are used to develop a neighborhood typology, identify temporal trends, and describe the pathways of transition. Results reveal four crosscutting neighborhood types: Black Distressed; Lower Middle; Multifamily, Educated, Turnover; and Upper Middle, which persist across space and time. Most neighborhoods (61%) remained classified within the same type over 40 years, and transitions were concentrated in two decades (1970–1980 and 2000–2010). The results offer a new descriptive dimension for understanding the unevenness present across legacy cities and suggest that existing policy approaches continually reproduce the same neighborhood outcomes.

The road through the Rust Belt : from preeminence to decline to prosperity / William M. Bowen, editor. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index.

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