The Governance Context for Adaptive Heritage Reuse: A Review and Typology of Fifteen European Countries

Recent years have seen growing international interest in the practice of ‘adaptive reuse’ of heritage buildings, promoted as a financially more viable and environmentally sustainable way to achieve both regeneration and conservation. In parallel, adaptive reuse has emerged as an aim in national policy frameworks and EU governance. Much of the writing on adaptive reuse reflects its nature as a design practice and concentrates on the material form intervention may take. This paper has a different approach, considering the institutional factors that support adaptive reuse occurring, as part of a multi-faceted and complex conservation-planning assemblage, across fifteen European countries. Focusing on regulatory systems for heritage and planning, governance systems, human and financial resources and policies on civic engagement and participation, thematic analysis is used to generate a typology of approaches across the continent, grouping the countries considered into three clusters. The typology proposed is not fixed, but a way to conceptualise the similarities and differences in institutional and policy-contexts that facilitate or restrict adaptive reuse. It contributes to a more informed overview of the context for adaptive reuse and the possibilities of learning from different policy contexts.