1. INTRODUCTION
Adapting cultural heritage sites and landscapes to contemporary life and uses is a key strategy for fostering sustainable development in our communities. Bridging disciplines like cultural management, architecture, spatial planning, heritage preservation, cultural landscapes, environmental policies, local economies, and social innovation offers a potential methodology for revitalising underused, culturally significant areas of our cities and returning them to society. Revitalising these places and spaces is crucial for recreating a vibrant and lively urban fabric where it once thrived.
The adaptive reuse of cultural heritage (ARCH) has traditionally been studied through the lens of architecture, archaeology, and engineering, focusing primarily on the physical aspects of heritage sites and the technical challenges of their preservation. However, many large-scale cultural infrastructure projects (e.g., underused sports facilities in former Olympic host cities) have shown that programming content is a difficult and often underestimated factor, crucial to the long-term sustainability of such projects. Successful adaptive reuse requires a deep understanding of the project’s immediate context—how it can engage with and serve local communities, address local issues, and meet everyday needs. It’s important that the community recognizes the project as their own, one created for the people and by the people.
Recently, adaptive reuse of cultural heritage has been understood within a more complex framework that encompasses the economic, environmental, and social sustainability of each project, maximising its potential. The practice of engaging with communities, institutions, and stakeholders has evolved, driven by the need to create more inclusive projects that address a wider array of social and urban challenges. This approach also aims to generate long-term economic sustainability, create jobs, and build professional capacity in the field.
1.1 The (re)use of heritage
What we call heritage today extends far beyond lists of cultural monuments and buildings protected by state regulations. The concept of heritage is fluid and varies by context. Heritage status can be granted through official government practices that protect tangible objects (such as archaeological sites, buildings, landscapes) or intangible practices (such as rituals, spiritual practices, or dances). It can also emerge from informal, community-led initiatives that valorise memories of collective history, even when they are not officially recognized. While adaptive reuse of cultural heritage typically applies to tangible heritage, its scope is broad—it can range from large-scale projects involving listed buildings with substantial budgets and profitability, to small community efforts focused on reviving sites without formal status but that are sensitive to social issues and local realities.
At the same time, so-called “culture wars” are unfolding in many regions, turning significant artefacts into battlegrounds and challenging hegemonic or shared histories and values. Examples include the widespread discontent and destruction of post-socialist memorials across Eastern and Central Europe; the nostalgic reconstruction of pre-modern buildings as cultural artefacts, as seen in Germany and Hungary; the reassessment of postcolonial artefacts in public spaces, as in Brussels, England, and some U.S. cities; and the creation of European museums like the Quai Branly in Paris, which display objects looted by colonial powers, raising questions of origins and possession of heritage and identity. Extreme cases, such as the deliberate and politically charged destruction of centuries-old heritage sites during recent conflicts and wars in Armenia, Syria, Iraq, Palestine and others, also illustrate that heritage production today is not a linear process. Instead, it is a multidimensional political socio-economic practice that involves (re)creating or destroying collective memories, managing oblivion, and integrating heritage into contemporary life, public spaces, and communities.
Heritage and its place in contemporary life becomes even more relevant in the face of the faster and ever-modernising urbanisation and expansion into wild landscapes – be it for agriculture, infrastructure, mobility or housing. As Marshall Berman rightfully notes, quoting Marx, to be modern is to live in a world where “all that is solid melts into air” (Berman, 1982: 15). Adapting today’s heritage and integrating it into our settlements in a truly sustainable way can help us slow the inevitable process of “melting” and offer hope that we can still create collective memories alongside our communities.
This report is yet another attempt to describe and frame in a comprehensive way the policies and practices of working with cultural heritage reuse and adaptation while bringing new uses, logics and sustainable practices into urban politics and economies. The report builds upon some of the scientific and political documents that have been in the spotlight throughout the second part of XX century until nowadays and have been leading the debates towards better understanding of what is heritage and how to bring it into our everyday life through a durable social and economic model. The current report looks at the policy, legal and practical frameworks concerning adaptive reuse of cultural heritage sites of six countries, part of the European Union – these are Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Germany, Italy and Spain.
1.2 Adaptive reuse of cultural heritage today
One of the primary objectives of ARCH is to activate historical buildings or sites that are no longer in their original use. Cultural space activation is a strategy to enliven underutilised or abandoned heritage sites, turning them into active public spaces for education, commerce, culture or public gatherings. According to Landorf (2011), adaptive reuse provides a means for preserving historical integrity while offering contemporary relevance, which allows these spaces to maintain their significance and preserve the sense of place besides the rapidly changing urban environment.
However, the activation of cultural heritage sites through adaptive reuse often leads to tensions regarding authenticity, belonging and commodification. Critics argue that transforming heritage sites into commercial or entertainment venues risks turning cultural heritage into a product, rather than preserving its intrinsic value (Plevoets & Van Cleempoel, 2013). This debate hinges on whether cultural space activation prioritises genuine cultural practices or merely repurposes heritage for economic gain. Balancing these priorities is essential to ensure that adaptive reuse maintains both the physical and cultural dimensions of heritage, as well as its connection to the social context of the place.
Placemaking refers to the process of creating vibrant, inclusive spaces that foster a sense of community and belonging. In the context of adaptive reuse, placemaking is critical because it ensures that repurposed heritage sites become meaningful places for contemporary users while maintaining connections to their historical and cultural past. As Jane Jacobs (1961) noted, successful placemaking involves creating spaces that reflect the identity of the people who use them, enhancing both community pride and social interaction.
However, the placemaking process in adaptive reuse can sometimes overlook the needs of local communities in favour of attracting tourism or investment. Zukin (2010) highlights how placemaking can lead to gentrification, where revitalised cultural spaces cater more to affluent visitors than to the residents who previously used or identified with the space. This can create a disconnect between the repurposed space and its surrounding community, undermining the intended benefits of adaptive reuse as a tool for community enhancement and cultural preservation.
Community engagement is vital to the success of adaptive reuse projects, as it ensures that the transformed spaces meet the needs and aspirations of the people who live and work near them. According to Duxbury et al. (2016), involving communities in the decision-making process fosters a sense of ownership and helps retain the cultural significance of a site. When communities are engaged meaningfully, adaptive reuse projects can enhance social cohesion and create spaces that reflect the cultural identity of the community.
Nevertheless, community engagement in adaptive reuse is often fraught with challenges. Critics argue that engagement processes are sometimes superficial or tokenistic, serving only as a formality without allowing communities to influence key decisions. Pendlebury (2013) points out that this can result in projects that, while aesthetically pleasing, fail to resonate with the local community or address their social and cultural needs. Effective community engagement requires long-term dialogue and collaboration to ensure that adaptive reuse serves both cultural preservation and social inclusivity.
The adaptive reuse of cultural heritage involves complex interactions between preserving the past and meeting contemporary needs. Cultural space activation, placemaking, and community engagement are central to this process, but they also bring forth debates about authenticity, commodification, and inclusivity. Further on the debates delve other directions such as preservation vs. innovation, sustainability vs. environmental impact, economic vs. cultural priorities and dynamic vs. static concept of heritage. Ensuring that adaptive reuse projects successfully activate cultural spaces while fostering meaningful placemaking and robust community engagement is crucial to their long-term success. This requires a balance between economic development and cultural preservation, with a strong emphasis on engaging local communities in ways that reflect their identity and values.
1.3 Methodology and structure
The current report proposes methodology that follows three different paths which have naturally become the three main chapters:
Country reports
Country reports of each of the six participant countries which describe their state political and regulatory frameworks and how their state policies intervene with the current societal activist and private sector initiatives in the field of ARCH. This part is focusing not so much on the actual project sites while on the institutional framework that makes one or another project possible. Following Jessop’s (2008) strategic-relational approach of analysing institutions, we look at the larger institutionalist context and the relative actor constellations that describe a given regulatory landscape. The conditions of possibility of a given project are deeply connected with the regulatory tradition in each country, its system for spatial planning, including urban planning and environmental regulations, cultural heritage regulations, educational system, funding opportunities, structure of industries, job creation etc. The country reports are in the form of a desktop research, and they follow five different axes of analysis: (1) policy and regulations, (2) funding and resources, (3) green transition practices, (4) public participation and engagement, (5) capacity and innovations.
Focus groups
Focus groups debates from each of the six countries where members of activist groups, experts and practitioners’ debate what are the current and future possibilities for cultural heritage adaptive reuse in each of their national contexts according to their experience. The focus group methodology is based on semi-structured interviews that creates an exchange of often lived but unwritten experiences of citizens, activists and experts. On the one hand these testimonies could be seen as a non-exhaustive inventory of practices that could happen in the given context, described in the first chapter; as “ways of doing things” in the field of ARCH for each context; a set of practices, habits, understandings and traditions that are in constant evolution. On the other hand, they could be a powerful critical voice of what might go better in the institutional and bureaucratic machinery in order that the contemporary practices of ARCH have been recognised, valued and integrated on a policy level.
Observatory cases
Series of fifteen observatory cases per country has been chosen as an updated non-exhaustive overview of the latest heritage adaptive reuse projects that happen to be developed in the six different countries. The cases come to exemplify and cross the descriptions from the institutional framework and practice-based experiences. Following criteria were put in place in order to choose wider range of projects: various civic engagement coalitions – public, private and civil society; various functions – industrial, cultural, social etc.; various development status and phase - idea, completed, failed; various historical periods of the heritage; various heritage legal status – protected, not protected etc.
REFERENCES
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Jessop, B. (2008). Institutions and institutionalism in political economy: A strategic–relational approach. In J. Pierre, B. G. Peters, & G. Stoker (Eds.), Debating institutionalism (pp. 210–231). Manchester University Press.
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Landorf, C. (2011). Evaluating social sustainability in historic urban environments. International Journal of Heritage Studies, 17(5), 463–477. https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2011.563788
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Zukin, S. (2010). Naked city: The death and life of authentic urban places. New York: Oxford University Press.