Balancing Nostalgia With Future Vision

An important point from Karl:

There’s a wider debate that we never properly had about the reconstruction of the city centre […] If the alternative on offer is the heritage lobby’s nostalgic and naive fantasy of historic preservation, then we stand little chance of coming up with any creative and original ideas. A good starting point is to think what kind of city we aspire to have, not be obsessed with preserving all that we inherited.

It is important to grasp the nuance in this point. He is not saying: “Let’s replace classic pieces of architecture with boring, soulless, office buildings”. He is saying “Let’s make our own stamp on history by creating new designs that reflect a vision of who we are and who we aspire to be”.