The Power of Place, published in 1997, is relevant to anyone involved in the process of spatial and cultural production, or to young architects in search of alternative practices. It is for those who acknowledge the real way architects work, as a collective enterprise, which is not often the way architects talk about their work. Dolores Hayden is an inventive thinker whose pioneering work in community architecture comes from a way of thinking about urban preservation that goes beyond the conventional expert view of unique buildings, historic districts, and isolated monuments. She looks at urban landscape as public history, as a vast cultural panorama that recognises the lives of ordinary people. The book delves into descriptions of experimental projects that she has initiated and been involved in, and always involves a large of actors, including locals people, historians, students, and politicians in the city of Los Angeles.

The ideas that emerge from her studies of LA are pertinent to the meaning of urban preservation in any growing 21st-century city, which experiences a constant cycle of destruction and reconstruction. Hayden understands what is significant in shaping what we see and feel of city life.

Most of her projects imply breaking down the boundaries to collaboration that separate social and professional people, which means inventing a practice based on what one feels strongly about, inventing a life for oneself. Hayden is also concerned with the aesthetics of places, with what gives physical places a special character, but equally what the politics of these spaces are, in a questioning of how issues of gender race, age class, and ethnicity affect people’s access to the city. Any site in the city has an important history. This book shows how to unlock found urban histories, as crazy as they may be, to discover specific things often neglected but nevertheless full of originality and inspiration. Going through the pages, one learns about how important it is to find an attitude towards a place, towards people, in order to figure out how much really needs to be done, how much needs to be changed, how much needs to be appropriated to reveal the power of the place.