If you destroy something today, you have also binded the hands of a future generation who will never get to enjoy it. Most of the popular vacation places in the world are historic/old sites. If we tear down everything old to put up cheaper, more efficient buildings are we necessarily better off?
If we took things to the absolute extreme and tore it all down? Yes we would be better off. I don't think the current value of historic sites outweighs the deadweight. This is coming from a North American perspective though.
It wouldn't be the best option but the sites that have survived a hundred of years didn't survive because some legal mandate dictated it. It's because they were buildings built to last.
You are right that this is a very American perspective. Maybe we could learn something from societies that have been around much longer and tend to care more about their past.
==It wouldn't be the best option but the sites that have survived a hundred of years didn't survive because some legal mandate dictated it. It's because they were buildings built to last.==
Or they have historical value specifically because they were built to last. Obviously, we wouldn’t know that unless we allow them to last.
Caring about the past is not the same as paying for the upkeep of a historic museum that costs as much as 3 museums when the historic museum was actually kind of a dump. The status quo is goddamned rediculous.
If I had to choose my position it would be less broad protection of historic buildings. However if I have to choose one extreme or the other I see homelessness exploding where I live and a bunch of money spent on bullshit. We're not talking about preserving the Sistine Chapel here.
> Most of the popular vacation places in the world are historic/old sites.
No, they're the remains of historic/old sites that were left after people of yore tore down everything else to build anew.
You don't have to preserve 100% of the "old city" to get a glimpse into an era, just like you don't have to preserve 100% of the city wall just to show that once upon a time, city walls were a thing.
> If we tear down everything old to put up cheaper, more efficient buildings are we necessarily better off?
You don't have to tear down everything in San Francisco, but most of it has little to no "historic value".
Not everything is about San Francisco, even if HN wants to think otherwise. Plenty of other cities have historic buildings with their own value, Chicago bungalows are an example. They represent a point in time and are still viable structures for today’s families.
Places like Cinque Terra, Istanbul and Cartagena are popular specifically because they have been preserved and are not just remains.
