IMPLEMENTING THE CIRCULAR ECONOMY: THE ROLE OF CULTURAL HERITAGE AS THE ENTRY POINT. WHICH EVALUATION APPROACHES?

Abstract

The adaptive re-use of cultural assets is proposed as the entry point for implementing the circular city, that is the specific spatial/territorial aspect of the circular economy. The circular re-use contributes to implement the “city of the human being and of nature”, in which the nature is considered the most important infrastructure. The paper discuss the ways in which adaptive reuse can be implemented, starting from some fundamental problems and the approach taken, and that determines the differences with other approaches about heritage assets reuse, in which the key attention is about the attractiveness and its multidimensional impacts and in which the economic, environmental, social, cultural dimensions are interpreted as having the same weight. The perspective is to search in the adaptive reuse new solutions able to re-integrate economy into ecology and into the human paradigm using new tools: from new management models to new evaluation decision support systems.

Keywords: adaptive reuse; integrated evaluation; circular economy