Urban alchemy: transforming spaces, empowering communities

To address the environmental, economic and social challenges facing our societies, cities should adopt alternative approaches to become more sustainable. In this respect, the building sector forms the foundation for the social and economic life of communities, as well as constituting an important part of communities’ environmental footprint. This sector shapes how people live, work and interact. Buildings account for nearly half of all material extraction, over half of energy used, and account for over 30 per cent of water use and waste produced in the European Union.
They also impact social life within cities; the way buildings are designed and planned shapes access to economic opportunities, community cohesion, safety and general quality of life. In order to improve resource efficiency, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve socioeconomic outcomes, the ways in which buildings are designed, constructed, used and ultimately deconstructed require reimagining, where there are many different strategies for this, each has different positive and negative social, environmental and economic impacts. One practice that has emerged quite prominently is as ‘adaptive reuse’. Adaptive reuse broadly involves refurbishing buildings constructed for older programs for new purposes. Historically, older buildings often have been tended towards demolition either due to the belief that new developments are more valuable or because buildings are seen as outdated or inefficient. However, the trend towards adaptive reuse has been growing more recently Adaptive reuse has both advantages and disadvantages from environmental, economic, and social perspectives. By utilizing material already embedded in existing structures, adaptive reuse reduces the need for new resources needed in construction, hence leading to significant emission savings.
The adaptive reuse of buildings, structures and areas has been studied in a wide range of scientific and academic literature, from the general aspects of reuse to specific examples, economics studies, architectural to sociological investigations. However, the social side effects of adaptive reuse, and its association to displacement and gentrification are less discussed. The question of displacement is associated with the spatial nature of the project, yet it has to deal with social, economic and environmental factors. This dissertation looks into the spatial strategies that allowed adaptive reuse to become a resource for keeping the residents rather than displacing them, through analyzing four exemplars: La Borda, Granby Four Streets, Buiksloterham and Mares Madrid. Although those cases differ in scale; from infill, to street and block, to neighborhood regeneration, to a more city-wide scale, they still proved to share some commonalities that contributed to their success. Those cases share a participatory aspect, through the engagement of the local community which is consistent in all of them. Moreover, even if the situation of land was different among them, they all found a proper solution in dealing with this issue. In addition to that, they shared an environmental concern where they all used the existing form, place, community, or even urban tissue as a resource in different scales and capacities.
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