We invite you to join the second Cultural Heritage in Action sharing stories webinar on “Adaptive reuse of (industrial) buildings with a history”!
The webinar will be on Monday 4 April at 2 pm CET, as part of our EU-funded Cultural Heritage in Action peer-learning programme. It will feature speakers from Ljubljana, Brno, and Valladolid. You can see the programme and register here.
Europe has a rich and multi-faceted built environment, incorporating strong spiritual, cultural, social and economic values. Due to evolutions in our economies and societies, many heritage sites, whether listed or not, are nowadays disused or have lost the functions for which they were originally built – notably industrial sites.
However, heritage buildings that have lost their original function still embody their multiple values. Adaptive re-use offers itself as a strategy aimed at preserving the elements that contain these values, while at the same time adapting the place for new uses and meeting needs of our time. Through smart renovation and transformation, heritage sites can find new, mixed or extended uses. As a result, their social, environmental and economic value is increased, while their cultural significance is enhanced.
Sensitive adaptive re-use of existing and historic buildings can also play a key role in Europe’s green transformation, avoiding energy-intensive new construction and land use, promoting waste-avoidance and preserving embodied energy while generating additional positive economic, environmental, social and cultural co-benefits. For this reason, the re-use of (industrial) heritage buildings offer many opportunities for advancing the goals of the New European Bauhaus initiative launched by the European Commission in 2020.
Explore, through concrete examples, the benefits of re-using heritage sites, the challenges inherent to adaptive re-use projects as well as the drivers of quality interventions on cultural heritage. Among other questions, we will discuss How to preserve cultural, historic, spatial and economic values of underused heritage buildings while at the same time adapting them for new, contemporary uses? What are the benefits of re-using heritage places? What are challenges inherent to adaptive re-use projects? What are the drivers for quality interventions on cultural heritage – bringing economic and social values to local communities?
To participate please register here.