Building reuse is a strategy for built heritage enhancement. The establishment of new activities in an existing building can have positive effects on the urban and territorial context and modify the dynamics of socio-economic development. If the reuse is considered as a cultural development strategy and not limited to a single building but to both buildings and infrastructures, these effects are amplified. This is the case of railway heritage, affected by an increasingly vast process of abandonment. The Italian policies for encouraging road transport and the communication models of the digital era have contributed to the gradual desertion of railway lines. This requires effective reuse models, to avoid that the Ferrovie dello Stato (State Railways) continue to carry the heavy burden of managing assets no longer able to generate income. The analysis of numerous station reuse cases, at an international level, lead to the selection of the case of the Postal Museum and Mail Ride in London as an example of good practice. The proposed methodology identifies a set of evaluation criteria and indicators to assess the effectiveness of adaptive reuse projects both in terms of their ability to protect built heritage identity and to modify the orientation of the territorial context’s development towards socio-economic sustainability guidelines.

If, nowadays, the Communities’ welfare lies in new expressions of collaboration between different types of subjects for the achievement of common objectives, cultural consensus becomes the collective transformation tool to promote regeneration interventions of life contexts encouraged by new social innovation ideas such as products, services and models. This research considers five aspects of the social dimension to define energy systems location and their acceptability. In particular: social equity: as a fair distribution of costs and risks throughout society; spatial equity: as a fair distribution of risks and costs throughout the territory; intergenerational equity: as a proper assessment of the risks that would entail current locations for future generations; procedural equity: when the location decisions and the same decision making process are perceived as legitimate by all concerned; equity structural: when the localization process involves all aspects and interests, leaving no one out for their approaches (Murphy and Stanley 2006). In relation to the analyzed aspects, this study suggests a point of view on the role of reasoning and interpreting the social activity of individuals in relation to bottom-up decision-making processes for the formation of cultural consensus when changes in the usual life and environmental contexts occur.