Cultural heritage adaptive reuse for circular cities: a comparative analysis of challenges

Adaptive reuse is a strategy to conserve built cultural heritage while realizing its potential for sustainable development and tackling urban challenges such as reducing waste production. Cultural heritage adaptive reuse plays an important role in the transition towards circular economy by maintaining existing values and creating new ones, e.g. attractiveness enhancement. However, the knowledge about challenges faced by cultural heritage adaptive reuse is limited and has so far been produced through engaging a small variety of stakeholders and geographical settings only. A better understanding of such challenges can inform adaptive reuse and enable its wider adoption by offering solutions; thus, enhancing the bestowing of cultural heritage on future generations. To identify challenges, the cities of Amsterdam (NL), Salerno (IT), and Rijeka (HR) were selected as case studies. In each city, a workshop was organized, involving diverse representatives of the public, private, and civic sector. The identification of challenges and then solutions was based on the 6 critical steps of the Historic Urban Landscape approach. This acknowledged the cultural heritage demand for an integrated and holistic approach for its management and interpretation. Commonalities and variation among the case studies were revealed employing a quantitative and quantitative comparative analysis. These findings advance our understanding of challenges to cultural heritage adaptive reuse and offer solutions to overcome them while laying the ground for future additional and similar research.