Heritage in action. Adapting reuse for the Historic Urban Landscape.

This paper explores the centrality of adaptive reuse for knowing, accessing, understanding, conserving and enhancing open public spaces in the Historic Urban Landscape. The objective is to pro- pose an experimental process, the Adapting Reuse Process (ARP), as a possible approach to keep alive heritage sites balancing conservation on the one hand, and innovation, as well as the evolving needs of this time, on the other. The paper starts introducing the concept of ‘adaptive reuse’ and a change in terminology by using the expression of ‘adapting reuse’; it then presents an extensive section focused on the importance of ‘use’ within literature and the most recent European initiatives and events. Finally, it describes the ARP, its assumptions, phases and first results by reporting the experimental reactivation implemented by the H2020 ROCK project for Piazza Scaravilli in Bologna (Italy). Starting from this real application, the study contributes to the knowledge on and sharing of current practices in solutions for the functional re-appropriation of historic open public spaces; at the same time, it offers an interesting picture of what is being done in Europe on the matter of heritage’s adapting reuse.