OpenHeritage has released two new Policy Briefs as part of their project. The publications are focused on adapting heritage reuse to European policies and regional integration of reuse. These two briefs close the series of five OpenHeritage Policy Briefs. While the documents are mostly meant for professionals within the EU to facilitate adaptive heritage reuse (AHR), anyone working with heritage and reuse could benefit from the toolkits.
AHR projects are about the past, the present and the future, where tangible and intangible heritage from the past that is valued now is sustained for the future while simultaneously giving new purpose as part of ongoing social, economic, environmental and cultural transformation. As such, AHR can be a tool that contributes to achieving, for example, community engagement, higher quality of life regeneration, waste reduction, and/or emissions reduction.
Policy Brief #04 is titled “A roadmap for the EU and Europe: Integrating adaptive heritage reuse in wider EU policies, programmes and practices”. It presents the main trends as well as challenges for AHR in the European context and offers concrete recommendations on how to embed AHR in different EU policies and strategies around the following four themes: greener, smarter, integrated and locally led.
The other newly released Policy Brief #05 with the title “Regional integration of the adaptive heritage reuse projects: Strengthening sustainable local development” is dedicated to policymakers, heritage officers, and planners at local and regional levels of government, to help them navigate the diverse landscape of AHR projects and find models of regional integration that are the most suitable for their contexts. The Brief includes an analysis of four models that shed light on different ways of integrating AHR practices into a larger territorial framework and are based on the stakeholder roles and interests in the AHR process. Each model is illustrated by a concrete example from the OpenHeritage research work.
The earlier published Policy Briefs are still available for download as well here. These publications respectively handle (1) relevant tools and frameworks, (2) collaborative heritage reuse and (3) financing reuse.