Conflicting Values in Designing Adaptive Reuse for Cultural Heritage. A Case Study of Social Multicriteria Evaluation

Over the past two decades the Council of Europe has addressed cultural heritage preservation policies to the use of heritage as cultural capital. Given this definition, the conservation of cultural capital is crucial, for its intrinsic value and as an investment for cultural, social and economic development. Thus, principles and areas of actions have been defined with the aim of underlying the importance of cultural values for territorial identity. Especially for cultural heritage with a potential for tourism, the decisions about valorization interventions are not always consensual, given the coexistence of different instances from local inhabitants and tourists. Selecting among the potential uses the one that could ensure the preservation of physical characters as well as intangible values, fueling economic development, is still a challenging policy and design issue. In this context, this paper proposes the use of a multi-methodological approach based on Choice Experiments and Social Multicriteria Evaluation to support the adaptive reuse on real case study. The NAIADE approach has allowed the decision maker to consider both socio-economic and technical dimensions within the same evaluation framework.