An Integrated Decision Support System for the Sustainable Reuse of the Former Monastery of “Ritiro del Carmine” in Campania Region

Abstract

Nowadays, many public administrations have abandoned and underused heritage buildings due to a lack of public resources, although the effective contribution of cultural heritage as a driver and enabler of sustainable development is strongly recognized. Currently, investments in cultural heritage have multidimensional impacts (social, economic, historical, and cultural) and can contribute to increasing overall local productivity; improving the wellbeing of inhabitants; and attracting funding from the public, private, and private–social sectors. Lack of public resources has pushed local administrations to favor new forms of valorization of public property that can promote the “adaptive reuse” of historic buildings in order to preserve their social, historical, and cultural values. At the same time, administrations seek to stimulate the experimentation of new circular business, financing, and governance models in heritage conservation, creating synergies between multiple actors; reducing the use of resources; and regenerating values, knowledge, and capital. The objective of this paper is to propose an integrated evaluation model, based on multicriteria analysis, and a financial model to support the choice of an alternative reuse of an ancient monastery in the municipality of Mugnano in the Campania region in order to define a “shared strategy” based on a “bottom-up” approach. This starts from the needs of the local community but does not neglect the historical and cultural values of the heritage building, as well as the economic and financial feasibility. The positive results obtained show that the model proposed can be a useful decision support tool in environments characterized by high complexity such as cultural heritage sites, where the objective is to precisely highlight the elements that influence the dynamics of choice for building shared bottom-up development strategies.

Circular Economy Practices and Strategies in Public Sector Organizations: An Integrative Review

“…Grohmann et al [82] Lewandowski [83] Lewandowski [84] Torrieri et al [85] Bao et al [86] Santos et al [87] Qi et al [88] Gorbatchev and Zenchanka [89] * Publications mentioning only the importance of CE in PP.…”

“…Grohmann et al [82] explored the potential reuse of pruning waste collected on public land as a material source to create panels for thermal insulation, and thereby contribute to the sustainable management of public urban areas. Another work also examined the practice of reuse in the context of heritage buildings such as monasteries, proposing an integrated evaluation model to support the choice of the best alternative reuse of these types of buildings, thus optimizing the use of public spaces and public buildings [85]. Moreover, the public transport sector was also highlighted with a study examining the use of buses fueled with renewable energy in the form of biogas as an innovation that reuses biowaste from the treatment of sewage, food waste from households, and manure to deliver the service of public transport [68].…”

“…The third public sector area highlighted by this review and an essential element of the organizational CE framework is the area of public service delivery. As pointed out in the literature review, a few studies have researched and explored CE principles as applied to delivering innovatively and collaboratively more sustainable public services in sectors such as municipal waste management, public transport, public urban spaces, and heritage buildings [68,85,89]. This aspect of the public sector related to its output and outcomes is of primary importance, as integrating CE practices and strategies has the potential to improve the efficiency and to transform the way that public services and the development of public policies are provided, having thus a considerable potential positive impact on citizens, their collective and individual behavior, their well-being, and on society and its overall sustainability.…”

Cultural Heritage: A Hybrid Framework for Ranking Adaptive Reuse Strategies

“…The literature offers a wide range of techniques applied to real cases of reuse that have proved effective in defining an appropriate methodological framework to face the complexity of reuse problems [14][15][16][24][25][26]28,37,40,44]. Furthermore, most of the scientific articles belong to the category of alternative use selection/adaptive reuse [48,[63][64][65][66][67][68][69][70][71].…”

Enhancing the Cultural Heritage through Adaptive Reuse. A Multicriteria Approach to Evaluate the Castello Visconteo in Cusago (Italy)

“…The origin of this phenomenon was mainly due to the dizzying increase in the maintenance and management costs of properties for owners, public or private, and the increasingly limited funding from public bodies. Today, it represents one of the problems capable of igniting public opinion that is increasingly sensitive to the issues of the protection of historical and artistic heritage [5,6]. The protection of cultural heritage is not only of a conservative nature.…”