Adaptive Heritage Reuse: Mapping Policies and Regulations

Adaptive heritage reuse (AHR) has seen a flourishing of interest in the last decade within the European context of this study, both as a practice, and in scholarly work. In the broad sense, the term adaptive reuse suggests a change of use of a building or place, which requires some level of material change, while adaptive heritage reuse assumes a recognition of heritage values within the process of reuse. These heritage values are often formalised through designation or listing, or emerge from a more local or informal discourse. We consider both as valid, while we also recognise that the policies and regulations discussed in this chapter focus on the former. The chapter offers an approach to bring together the policy realms and governance arrangements that facilitate (or impede) Adaptive Heritage Reuse (AHR) at the national level. Our aim is to sketch the governance arrangements; specifically, to identify how these arrangements support particular policies, regulations, mechanisms, or their structural integration; as well as understand potential barriers or obstacles to be tackled. We present some of the findings from mapping out these governance arrangements in 15 European countries and analysing them across all settings, focusing on how they facilitate AHR. We present this mapping of AHR within institutional frameworks, aimed at enabling a contextual understanding of the conditions in which heritage can be reused, also as an analytical framework to map additional countries.