In today’s politically combustive world, tailored for symbolic drama, how fitting that Justin Herman Plaza is in the spotlight not for its forlorn condition, but for its problematic name.

Herman was executive director of the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency in the 1960s. His legacy includes the demolition of more than 1,000 homes and businesses in the Western Addition and the displacement of the largely African American families who lived there. On Thursday, the Recreation and Park Commission is likely to vote to strip Herman’s name from the large public space next to Embarcadero Center and across from the Ferry Building.

Which raises two questions: What name should follow in its wake? And will the transformation include the difficult work of making the prominently located space relevant to today’s city?

The name change is simple. In fact, on a visit to the plaza Tuesday I couldn’t find any sign or plaque that referred to Herman at all.

Instead, I encountered a stark concrete landscape familiar to anyone who has cut through the plaza on the way from the Financial District to the Embarcadero waterfront. Cracked pavers and sagging walkways. Lunch tables with their swivel chairs bolted into place.

The aggressively exuberant Vaillancourt Fountain is dry, again, while workers behind a chain-link fence install the plaza’s skating rink for the still-distant holiday season. A homeless person’s tent hides behind the fountain and the back of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Memorial, an easy-to-miss tribute to American participants in the Spanish Civil War.

Not all is dismal: The gingko trees alongside the tables look great. A hummingbird treated a potted shrub as a breakfast buffet. Jean Dubuffet’s huge sculpture “La Chiffonniere” is striking. But there’s no earthly reason you would want to be there.

Which in some ways makes it a fitting tribute to Herman, a tenacious leader in the cause of urban renewal — a cause embraced nationwide in the 1950s by decision-makers and then challenged, rightly, because of the damage that it caused.

“It’s as if planners and politicians were jealous of Europe because it had all those bombed-out city centers to work with,” said David Prowler, a San Francisco development consultant who has worked for community nonprofits and at City Hall. He also teaches a course at Stanford on the city’s battles over growth during the past 50-plus years.

In that course, Prowler shows a photo of Dresden after that German city was largely destroyed by bombs in World War II alongside an aerial photograph of the Western Addition, where nearly 60 blocks were razed as part of redevelopment efforts that began before Herman was hired in 1959, and continued after his death of a heart attack in 1971. They’re too similar for comfort.

That clearance, and the physical and mental scars left in its wake, is the reason that the Board of Supervisors voted 11-0 last month to urge the Rec and Park Commission to strip Herman’s name from the plaza on the Embarcadero. If the space is named for someone else, the board proclaimed, “this person should embody San Francisco values of equity, inclusion and forward-thinking.”

Read the resolution closely and you starting scratching your head. There are incomplete sentences and a reference to how the Embarcadero is so much nicer since the removal of the Central Freeway in 1991 — an elevated structure that in fact went through Hayes Valley and came down more than a decade later.

The double-deck Embarcadero Freeway was razed in 1991. Oh, those pesky facts.

In other words, the resolution reads as if it was slapped together in haste. Cobbled together from online sources in a local show of solidarity to efforts elsewhere to rename or remove Confederate memorials.

Herman, who served three mayors, becomes the cartoon villain of a compact drama. It’s the mirror image of the praise he received after his death, when he was extolled as a crusader for a more orderly city. He was lauded for the sort of vision embodied in Embarcadero Center, with its elevated walkways and aloof office towers — and “his” public plaza.

“The plaza wasn’t named for Justin Herman because he was a hero. It’s a monument to the ideology he represented,” Prowler said. “The idea that buildings and streets and the future were more important than the people already there.”

There was good to the ideology as well. One longtime affordable housing architect is Bob Herman, a relative, who argues that the Bay Area’s rich heritage of community-based developers in part has Justin Herman to thank — because the latter felt that the long-term livability of subsidized apartments would be helped by having those units owned and managed by local nonprofits.

Replacement names for the plaza already have flooded City Hall. Locally raised author Maya Angelou has been suggested, and African American photographer David Johnson. So has Tina Modotti, an artist who lived in San Francisco briefly and then moved to Mexico with photographer Edward Weston.

Oh, and Harvey Milk and Warren Hellman. Just because.

The board resolution originated with Supervisor Aaron Peskin, who suggests that the space for now be renamed Embarcadero Plaza.

I like it. And if city leaders really want the plaza to become an aspirational example of “San Francisco values,” then let’s make it into a better public space. Freshen it up. Clean Vaillancourt Fountain and update the concrete moonscape.

Then let the debate on renaming begin. In the meantime, Embarcadero Plaza will do just fine.

Place is a column by John King is The San Francisco Chronicle’s urban design critic. Email: jking@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @johnkingsfchron