Heritage adaptive reuse? Challenges and solutions identified.

Comparing the three cities, Nadia Pintossi drew a general insight by identifying the common challenges. These findings can contribute to enabling the adoption and implementation of heritage reuse by providing evidence of the challenges and solutions to address them in the three cities investigated and similar contexts. Also, this research advances the understanding of the adaptive reuse of heritage by offering a more general insight into its challenges.

Importance of adaptive resuse

Heritage can drive and enable sustainable development when conserved. To conserve heritage, adaptive reuse is a proven strategy. Adaptive reuse is an intervention that preserves heritage, while adapting it for new uses. It can prolong heritage lifespan, preserve the values associated with heritage assets, create values, and include climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies.

Also, adaptive reuse contributes to both a circular economy and circular cities by reusing existing resources such as heritage. Thus, the adaptive reuse of heritage can contribute to sustainable development.

Challenges are barriers, obstacles, and constraints that negatively affect the adoption and implementation of adaptive reuse. Addressing these challenges could facilitate its adoption to conserve heritage, and favor the realization of its potential for sustainable development, circular cities, and climate change mitigation.

Addressing the knowledge gap

Previous research acknowledges key challenges, but there is a knowledge gap when it comes to identifying them. This gap relates to the point of view of some stakeholders, the urban scale, and selected contexts, locations, or cities.

For her research, Pintossi engaged with a broader variety of stakeholders, such as local authorities and NGO representatives, to complement the available point of view of architects and project managers. Then she investigated the three European cities (Amsterdam, Salerno, and Rijeka) to expand the number of locations. Finally, she adopted a multi-scale perspective based on the Historic Urban Landscape approach to consider both the site and the urban scale.

City solutions

To start, Pintossi identified challenges and solutions in each city. To do so, she organized a workshop in each city. During these workshops, stakeholders participated in roundtable discussions about challenges and solutions, and data from the discussions was collected, which was then analyzed. Finally, she performed a comparative study to determine the common challenges.

The findings cast a new light on the challenges faced by the adaptive reuse of heritage within the three cities, while highlighting additional challenges and revealing different nuances for the challenges.

Pintossi’s research also formulated solutions that cover policy-making, strategies, actions, and tools which contribute to facilitating the adaptive reuse of heritage or creating a favorable environment for it in the three cities. Although some solutions need to be tested, they offer a repository for stakeholders dealing with the adaptive reuse of heritage.

Common challenges

With the comparative study, Pintossi found 14 common challenges. Examples of these challenges are lack of awareness, knowledge, and capacity; cultural heritage interpretation and management; data management; costs; conflicting interests; and lack of participatory processes.

These challenges are common to European cities with diverse socio-cultural-economic-political contexts and scales; thus, they are likely representative of the European region. Some of these challenges might be cross-regional because studies also identified the same challenges in Asia, North America, and Oceania.

The general insight derived by this comparative study contributes to developing a framework for these challenges, and it can inform practitioners and multiple governmental levels of policy-making. This enhances the understanding of the adaptive reuse of cultural heritage and its adoption and implementation. Also, some of these common challenges relate to some Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Therefore, addressing these challenges could contribute to the efforts to achieve these SDGs.

Title of PhD-thesis: “Challenges and potential solutions for cultural heritage adaptive reuse. A comparative study employing the Historic Urban Landscape approach”. Promotors: Ana Pereira Roders (TU Delft), Pieter van Wesemael (TU/e). Co-promotor: Deniz Ikiz Kaya (TU/e). Other main parties involved: CLIC project (Horizon 20202).