Co-evolutionary heritage reuse: a European multiple case study perspective

ABSTRACT

Reusing heritage sites is no longer only a practice of maintaining the historic, built values of a heritage object, but increasingly also a practice of linking heritage buildings to other aims such as involving local (heritage) communities or integrating heritage in its urban context. However, working closely with local heritage communities and incorporating multiple aims and stakeholders – each with their own interests and understanding of heritage – makes projects of heritage reuse highly complex. To address and understand this complexity, various scholars argue for a co-evolutionary perspective that sees heritage as a manifestation of interrelated and interdependent processes. This paper translates the concept of co-evolution into a conceptual model for analysing practices of heritage reuse. We apply this model in sixteen selected European projects of heritage reuse, to analyse how and why co-evolution manifests itself in projects of heritage reuse. This analysis demonstrates that the actions of initiators and other actors in the heritage reuse projects, as well as the social/institutional system in which they operate, are conducive to whether or not a co-evolutionary heritage approach is enacted.

KEYWORDS:

• Relational notions
• heritage reuse
• co-evolutionary heritage approach
• community-heritage engagement

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank our OpenHeritage colleagues who took part in the data collection on the cases discussed in this article. We thank Levente Polyák, Daniela Patti and Bahanur Nasya from Eutropian; Federica Fava, Fabrizia Cannella and GiovanniCaudo from RomaTre University; Andrea Tönkő and Hanna Szemző from the Metropolitan Research Institute; Dóra Mérai and Volodymir Kulikov from Central European University; Olivier Schulbaum and Nadia Nadesan from Platoniq; Alina Tomescu and Joep de Roo from Eurodite; Iryna Sklokina from the Center for Urban History. Also thanks to Markus Kip from the Humboldt University and Alessandro Piperno from Luiss University for helping in the analysis and review of the data collected.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European project OpenHeritage – Organizing, Promoting and Enabling Heritage Re–use through Inclusion, Technology, Access, Governance and Empowerment. This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No [776766].