"A socially inclusive urban landscape history can become the basis for new approaches to public history and urban preservation. This will be different from, but complementary to, the art-historical approaches to architecture that has provided a basis for architectural preservation. a more inclusive urban landscape history can also stimulate new approaches to urban design, encouraging designers, artists, and writers, as well as citizens, to contribute to an urban art of creating a heightened sense of place in the city. This would be urban design that recognizes the social diversity of the city as well as the communal uses of space, very different form urban design as monumental architecture governed by from or driven by real estate speculation.

...George Kubler once described the historian's craft as delineating the 'shape of time.' The art of the historian , he wrote , resembles that of the painter, ' to discover a patterned set of properties that will elicit recognition all while conveying a new perception of the subject.' the historian who confronts urban landscapes in the 1990's needs to explore their physical shapes along with their social and political meanings. Learning the social meanings of historic places by discussing them with urban audiences involves the historian to collaboration with the residents themselves as well as with planners and preservationists, designers and artists. it engages social, historical, and aesthetic imagination to locate where narratives of cultural identity, embedded in the historic urban landscape can be interpreted to project their largest and most enduring meanings for the city as a whole."

Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place, 1995 (MIT Press).