The Adaptive Reuse of Cultural Heritage in Amsterdam Smart City: Revealing its challenges and solutions

The pace of urbanization is unprecedented and its poor management can jeopardize urban liveability and human wellbeing. Cities are a privileged setting where inequality, climate change related issues, and resource scarcity among other challenges arise and can be tackled. Against this background, cultural heritage has been recognized as an asset to enhance urban liveability, ensure the endurance of the urban identity and foster human wellbeing.
However, being a commons asset, cultural heritage is also a resource which is advised to be co-created in management, conservation, and interpretation. Particularly, the adaptive reuse of cultural heritage and built heritage in particular, is assumed to ensure the management and conservation of cultural heritage. Furthermore, the adaptive reuse of cultural heritage entails the circularization of cultural heritage conservation. The circularization of cultural heritage implements the circular economy paradigm, where resources and their values are maintained over time via management, transformation, and reuse to create wellbeing.
When it comes to circularity and smartness, Amsterdam is a frontrunner city in Europe, with initiatives such as “Circular Amsterdam” and “Amsterdam Smart City”. The city of Amsterdam will host a Historic Urban Landscape (HUL) workshop in the framework of a European research project on “Circular models leveraging investments in cultural heritage adaptive reuse” (CLIC project). Around sixty participants from public and private sector will attend the workshop; namely, researchers and professionals in cultural heritage, heritage economics, circular economy, smartness, urban development and management, and urban sustainability. The paper presents the outcomes of this workshop which employ the Historic Urban Landscape (HUL) approach to investigate challenges and solutions of adaptive reuse of cultural heritage in Amsterdam Smart City.