About

Michael Holleran is an Associate Professor at the School of Architecture with a focus on water history, cultural landscapes, urban history, and historic preservation. His research includes the study of waterscapes in cities of the American West, and he is working on a book titled The Urban Ditch: Landscape, Life and Afterlives. His first book, Boston’s 'Changeful Times: Origins of Preservation and Planning in America,' contextualized the early preservation movement within broader environmental changes and urban development controls, and received multiple awards including the Antoinette Downing Award, the Lewis Mumford Award, and the Historic New England Book Award. Holleran has directed the Graduate Program in Historic Preservation at the School of Architecture from 2006 through Spring 2019. He has an extensive background in academia, having previously served as Associate Dean of Research and as an Associate Professor of Planning and Design at the University of Colorado College of Architecture and Planning, and taught Architecture and Landscape Architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design. He practiced for twelve years as a partner in Everett · Clarke · Holleran Associates, a firm specializing in preservation projects. His public service includes chairing the Landmarks Preservation Board in Boulder, Colorado, and serving on various preservation organization boards. Holleran holds an A.B. from Brown University, an M.C.P. from MIT, and a Ph.D. from MIT.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Law
• History
• Computer Science
• Environmental engineering
• Environmental planning
• Economics
• Engineering
• Business
• Water resource management
• Visual arts
• Art history
• World Wide Web
• Media studies
• Natural resource economics
• Archaeology
• Art
• Environmental science
• Management

Selected publications

• Afterlives of an American Waterscape: The Urban Ditch in the Long Twentieth Century

  Modern American History · 2026-03-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This article describes the nineteenth-century landscape of surface water distribution in cities of the U.S. West, focusing on its persistence after the advent of modern water mains, based on studies of San Antonio, Texas; Los Angeles, California; Salt Lake City, Utah; and Phoenix, Arizona. These systems of ditches, acequias , zanjas , and canals began as the primary urban water supply, then later comprised a secondary system complementing the mains. Ditch networks shrank in the twentieth century, but this ostensibly obsolete waterscape survived for decades and in many places to the present. Ditches persisted because they continued to serve the purposes of their users, because sanitary reforms abated their former pollution, and because new categories of utility emerged in amenity, heritage, and ecosystem services. The study takes the perspective of users as well as providers and finds, in contrast to conventional stories of hydraulic modernity, a continuing example of “water plurality.”

  PublisherDOI

• Review: <i>Historic Real Estate: Market Morality and the Politics of Preservation in the Early United States</i>

  Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians · 2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Computer Science

  Book Review| December 01 2022 Review: Historic Real Estate: Market Morality and the Politics of Preservation in the Early United States Whitney Martinko Historic Real Estate: Market Morality and the Politics of Preservation in the Early United States Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020, 328 pp., 11 color and 31 b/w illus. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 9780812252095 Michael Holleran Michael Holleran University of Texas at Austin Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (2022) 81 (4): 519–520. https://doi.org/10.1525/jsah.2022.81.4.519 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Michael Holleran; Review: Historic Real Estate: Market Morality and the Politics of Preservation in the Early United States. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 1 December 2022; 81 (4): 519–520. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jsah.2022.81.4.519 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of the Society of Architectural Historians Search The title of Whitney Martinko’s book, Historic Real Estate, is deceptively modest. The phrase “market morality” in her subtitle, however, begins to hint at the scope of this study, which is about more than preservation. Martinko’s gaze encompasses nothing less than the shaping of American institutions of civil society and political economy. In her telling, antebellum conflicts over the “architectural permanence of historic sites” were not only a window onto the boundaries around both communal governance and the pursuit of private profit but also an arena for setting those boundaries (8). Preservation, consequently, was no less than “a strategy for making a moral economy” (4). This is a cultural history, not a legal, political, or economic one; it makes a case for the salience of culture and capitalism in shaping one another. The book moves across many places: Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Charleston, and Newport—the big cities of the... You do not currently have access to this content.

  PublisherDOI

• Water Qualities and Usage in the Zanjas of Los Angeles, 1781–1904

  Environmental History · 2022 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Business
  • Environmental planning

  From the colonial era until the beginning of the twentieth century, most water used in Los Angeles was distributed through channels called zanjas, conduits supplying water for irrigation, power, and household use. Anglo-Americans sought an alternative to this network, and protomodern water mains began domestic deliveries in 1864. Mains did not at first displace zanjas; the two systems evolved together, competing to provide water for the conflicting usages of the era—household use, industrial use, and sewage removal. Angelenos managed the conflicts between usages and supply systems with a complex sociotechnical system of distributed agency and distributed competency: they filed nuisance suits, drafted regulation, and made public and private modifications to the infrastructure, tailoring the network for their particular needs. When the mains supplanted the zanjas, the Los Angeles water supply system lost a significant share of its flexibility and Angelenos much of their control over water.

  PublisherDOI

• Justin T. Clark. City of Second Sight: Nineteenth-Century Boston and the Making of American Visual Culture.

  The American Historical Review · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Visual arts

  “Visual culture” can mean a lot of things. In City of Second Sight: Nineteenth-Century Boston and the Making of American Visual Culture, Justin T. Clark’s book on Boston from 1820 to 1860, visual culture includes the construction of new public monuments and the beginnings of appreciation for historic structures; the depiction of views from public vantage points, and efforts to provide and preserve such viewpoints; and the graphic portrayal of streets and public spaces. It includes the provision of public galleries and opportunities for noncommercial consumption of the visual arts, and efforts to provide drawing instruction to various audiences. It includes the status of the blind and their reception in mainstream culture. It includes Spiritualist manifestations of the blind, of amateur and professional artists, and of art viewers, and it includes “fairy spectacles” in the theater and “fairy-themed events, known as ‘fancy fairs’” (167, 184). Things that visual culture does not mean in this book include fashion, photography (with the exception of spirit photography), ordinary street lighting and urban nightlife, and the new experience of landscape and city from a moving train. The book mentions but does not examine moving panoramas, pornographic prints, and the transformation of Boston Common into an ornamental urban ground. Clark contributes to gender history by describing women art-school graduates who competed with men in Boston’s substantial graphic publishing industry, but the rise of that industry itself is beyond the book’s purview. It does not include most of urban design or the large-scale visual order of private construction, beginning with Charles Bulfinch’s Tontine Crescent in 1794 and extending to the London squares of the South End and the Parisian boulevard of Commonwealth Avenue in the new Back Bay (it includes very little about transatlantic influences). The book’s cover shows a nighttime public projection promoting stereopticon advertising; neither the image nor these subjects are mentioned. So the book is not about many of the visual aspects of material culture, nor is it in the tradition of most urban history.

  PublisherDOI

• A Smart City Remembers Its Past

  IGI Global eBooks · 2019-01-01 · 3 citations

  book-chapter

  Integral to some conceptualizations of the “smart city” is the adoption of web-based technology to support civic engagement and improve information systems for local government decision support. Yet there is little to no literature on the “smartness” of gathering information about historic places within municipal information systems. This chapter provides three case studies of technologically augmented planning processes that incorporated citizens as sensors of data about historic places. The first case study is of SurveyLA, a massive effort of the city of Los Angeles to comprehensively survey over 880,000 parcels for historic resources. A second case study involves Motor City Mapping, an effort to identify the condition of buildings in Detroit, Michigan and a parallel historical survey conducted by volunteers. In Austin, Texas, a university-based research team designed a municipal web tool called the Austin Historical Survey Wiki. This chapter offers insights into these prior efforts to augment planning processes with “digitized memory,” web-based technology, and public engagement.

  PublisherDOI

• Roots in Boston, Branches in Planning and Parks 1

  2019-10-21 · 25 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Bostonians saved the Old South meetinghouse in the 1870s, bringing preservation to the heart of the city. They worked next to save Boston Common and historic landscapes. The preservation and parks movements grew together. In the 1890s, architects campaigned to save Boston’s Bulfinch State House, motivated by architectural history. They reconciled modern electrical, mechanical and safety systems with new ideas of historical integrity. Massachusetts legislators preserved views of their statehouse by enacting building height limits, which became one national ancestor of zoning. William Sumner Appleton, Jr., in 1910, institutionalized the movement in the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities (now Historic New England). He professionalized preservation but turned away from urban issues toward what he saw as New England’s Anglo-Saxon countryside. His philosophy encompassed all of material culture, which, in the long run, expanded the inclusiveness of the preservation movement.

  PublisherDOI

• A Smart City Remembers Its Past

  Advances in civil and industrial engineering book series · 2018-01-01 · 2 citations

  book-chapter

  Integral to some conceptualizations of the “smart city” is the adoption of web-based technology to support civic engagement and improve information systems for local government decision support. Yet there is little to no literature on the “smartness” of gathering information about historic places within municipal information systems. This chapter provides three case studies of technologically augmented planning processes that incorporated citizens as sensors of data about historic places. The first case study is of SurveyLA, a massive effort of the city of Los Angeles to comprehensively survey over 880,000 parcels for historic resources. A second case study involves Motor City Mapping, an effort to identify the condition of buildings in Detroit, Michigan and a parallel historical survey conducted by volunteers. In Austin, Texas, a university-based research team designed a municipal web tool called the Austin Historical Survey Wiki. This chapter offers insights into these prior efforts to augment planning processes with “digitized memory,” web-based technology, and public engagement.

  PublisherDOI

• :<i>Looking beyond the Icons: Midcentury Architecture, Landscape, and Urbanism</i>

  Winterthur Portfolio · 2017-06-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Introduction to the Special Issue

  Journal of the American Planning Association · 2016-03-21 · 3 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• America's early historic preservation movement (1850-1930) in a transatlantic context

  2016-02-24

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Jennifer Minner

  Cornell University

  5 shared

• Joshua Conrad

  Marshall University

  4 shared

• Andrea Roberts

  4 shared

• Patricia M. West

  1 shared

• Mary V. Hughes

  1 shared

• David Hamer

  1 shared

• Charles A. Birnbaum

  1 shared

• Eric Sandweiss

  1 shared

Labs

• Materials LabPI

Awards & honors

• Mid-Career Fellowship from the James Marston Fitch Foundatio…