Cultural heritage is recognized as a driver and enabler for sustainable development, and its role within the circular economy and circular cities is gaining attention. Its adaptive reuse plays a significant role in this while prolonging the heritage lifespan, preserving the values associated with heritage assets, and creating shared values. The adoption and implementation of the adaptive reuse of cultural heritage practices present challenges at multiple levels. This research aims to identify these challenges and propose solutions to overcome them, considering the post-industrial port city of Rijeka, Croatia, as a case study. The adaptive reuse of cultural heritage practices was assessed through a stakeholder engagement workshop performing a multi-scale analysis using the Historic Urban Landscape approach as an assessment framework. Forty-nine themes were identified by content analysis of the challenges and solutions identified by stakeholders involved in adaptive reuse practices and decision-making in the city. The five most mentioned themes refer to aspects relating to participation, capacity, regulatory systems, economics-finance, and knowledge. These findings provide evidence of challenges for policy- and decision-makers to be addressed in policy-making. Solutions are also suggested to facilitate the adaptive reuse of cultural heritage in the city of Rijeka and similar contexts, such as introducing policies to support participatory decision-making whose absence is a barrier.

The adaptive reuse of cultural heritage has been recognized as a driver of the circular economy. It stimulates economic growth, boosts its inherent values, and reduces material usage and energy consumption. It can be regarded unviable due to financial constraints, limitations in regulatory frameworks and lack of engagement in decision-making. To tackle these challenges, this study aims to examine the drivers and related policy instruments that support adaptive reuse practices, and to analyze the usefulness and feasibility of a set of multi-level policy enablers at varying local contexts. In this context, we first conducted a semi-systematic review of academic and gray literature and identified 19 driving factors and associated policy documents. These instruments were concentrated on administrative, regulatory and financial tools. This analysis led to the identification of policy enablers that can be adopted at three levels: European, national and local. An online survey was then conducted to investigate how a variety of local stakeholders in the selected case cities and region evaluate the adaptability of these enablers in their individual cases. The findings show that all the assessed enablers are deemed useful and feasible to a certain extent with higher score of usefulness, confirming the adaptability of these instruments into the circular economy framework. These evidence-based results can inform future policies at multiple-levels that will accelerate and scale up circular actions through heritage adaptive reuse.

Cultural heritage drives and enables sustainable urban development. The adaptive reuse of cultural heritage creates values while prolonging the lifespan of heritage. Similarly, circular economy creates value while extending the useful life of materials and elements through their reuse. Existing studies on adaptive reuse challenges seldom focus on cultural heritage properties, and they are often identified through the engagement of a limited variety of stakeholders, as compared to the actors normally involved in adaptive reuse. Filling this gap, this paper provides a preliminary baseline of challenges faced by the city of Amsterdam from the perspective of various involved stakeholders, and suggests solutions to address them. The participants represented the public, private, knowledge, and third sectors. The methods used were the following: for data collection, a multidisciplinary workshop using the steps of the Historic Urban Landscape approach as an assessment framework applied to multiple scales on adaptive reuse, and for data analysis, manifest content analysis. The results expanded the range of challenges and solutions reported by previous literature on the adaptive reuse of cultural heritage in content and scale by identifying 61 themes—e.g., knowledge and civic engagement. Tools and stakeholders were also identified. These findings provide a reference for future practice, policymaking, and decision-making, facilitating the adaptive reuse of cultural heritage to capitalize on its potential for sustainable development and circular economy.