Ethics and aesthetics of adaptive heritage reuse in Europe: an introduction to what happens to territories when heritage is touched

Abstract

Purpose

The paper introduces ethical and aesthetical implications emerging from participative forms of adaptive heritage reuse. Its aim is to depict the overall framework to contextualize the investigations explored in the Special Issue titled “Ethics and aesthetics of adaptive heritage reuse in Europe.” Therefore, the article confronts with potentialities and contradictions of “open” heritage processes, introducing key critical elements to recode heritage practices and planning in today’s conjuncture of global change.

Design/methodology/approach

The paper drawn on a literature review, which combines different bodies of studies: heritage, urban studies, care studies and recent policy documents. A photographic essay, moreover, serves to “augment” the presented argumentations through a visual apparatus resulting from one of Gaia Ginevra Giorgi’s artwork, which develops in the intersection between performative art, participation and territorial reuse.

Findings

The author argues that for adaptive heritage reuse to be really sustainable, ethical and aesthetical heritage codes need to be reassessed and reoriented toward the present socio-ecological priorities, multiplicating the ways cultural heritage is conceived, valued and reused. The paper suggests proceeding along the creative paths of uncertainty, providing the first elements to develop political projects of abundance and enjoyment for current urban settlements.

Practical implications

The presented argumentations can be used as a baseline by heritage managers and policymakers to experiment with participative processes of adaptive heritage reuse and to identify more environmentally and socially just trajectories of urban development.

Originality/value

The paper expands the concept of adaptive heritage reuse, considering the active participation of both human and non-human agents. Treating heritage in a laic way, namely free from absolute and preordered judgments of value, it deals with uncomfortable heritage materiality and contexts, illuminating the quality of unpleasant or odd forms of beauty.

Citation

Fava, F. (2024), "Ethics and aesthetics of adaptive heritage reuse in Europe: an introduction to what happens to territories when heritage is touched", Journal of Cultural Heritage Management and Sustainable Development, Vol. 14 No. 1, pp. 1-14. https://doi.org/10.1108/JCHMSD-06-2023-0078

Hope – making adaptations

It does not surprise that Soul Kitchen, the 2009 prized-winning comedy written by Fatih Akın and Adam Bousdoukos, was based on a true story. By combining feeling, urban speculation, maladies, super-heritage-(re)uses, expulsion and resistance practices, it introduces key critical elements for a living heritage process based on the adaptive reuse. Zinos is the Greek owner of a shabby restaurant, Soul Kitchen, located in a converted warehouse in one of the industrial sections of Hamburg, Germany. Trying to survive (and maybe to emancipate), he provides space and food for working-class clients while sharing the complex with odd, semi-illegal inhabitants. An encounter with Shayn, a sophisticated as well as hot-tempered chef, plus an injury to Zinos’s back definitely crumbles this very fragile equilibrium. Equilibrium already threatens by the interest of a real estate developer that, to overcome Zinos’s continual refusals to sell him the building, reports a faked public intoxication to the Hamburg hygiene office. The cost to make the restaurant compliant with the city regulations seems to give the final aut aut to Zinos and his companions, but a good, and suddenly wealthy, friend will allow him to keep the restaurant in its owner’s hands, making it accessible to what has become an increasingly diverse community of followers.

Breaking through the difficulties to achieve a happy end, this intriguing story depicts a spatial adventure driven by existential implications that critically presents other ways to protect, use and enjoy the past legacy while illuminating real estate mechanisms and dynamics connected to cultural regeneration. Moreover, it sheds light on the spatio-temporal expression of ongoing adaptive heritage reuse (AHR) (i.e. the experimental process of transformation) emerged from the active interaction between individuals, communities, many stakeholders and places. In doing so, it introduces some of the ethics and aesthetics attached to the “living” strategy of environmental protection and urban change which we aim to investigate in this Special Issue (SI), hereafter evoked also through the photography essay presented in this paper (see Plate 1 – 5). As in Soul kitchen, in such cases the heritage status is appointed by people or groups, often minor, reclaiming the right to use, manage and enhance their own contexts on the basis of a site-specific set of values such as the social, labor-oriented, (counter) cultural and economic.

In my view, the capacity to navigate and resist the pervasiveness (and the violence) of the speculative urban logics “through the interplay between complicity and opposition by residents with and/or against gentrification processes” (Annunziata and Rivas-Alonso, 2020, p. 61) is what makes the following experiences not only resistance practices but also, and perhaps mainly, places of hope. It is self-evident that this character is particularly important in today’s conjuncture of climate change (chaos), where the rise of new eco-anxiety goes in parallel to the pressing need to imagine desirable futures (Rao, 2022). From the cultural heritage viewpoint, it seems worthwhile to underline the nexus with the current heritage’s mission as expressed through the European and international conceptual and policy context: being a strategic resource to build meaning, peace and a sustainable world (CHCfE Consortium, 2015). This function is being strongly relaunched through the formulation of the 2005 Faro Convention (Volpe, 2023), in which the majority of case studies is explicitly based [1].

First, such cases are an “open heritage” in social terms. Following the Faro Convention, heritage is hereafter conceived as a co-evolutionary process, addressing the territorial and economic aspects through the lens of community engagement. Applied to heritage matters, the idea of openness thus “raise[s] the demand for open-source solutions and open access issues” (Oevermann and Szemző, 2023), aligning with the performative, thus affective, dimensions increasingly proposed by critical heritage studies (Smith, 2021).

In an indirect way, therefore, the socially oriented concern of the Faro Convention sheds light on matters of redistribution. As Krähmer and Cristiano (2022) argue, the combination of reuse with the principles of sufficiency and sharing open up to novel urban perspectives, which are functional to envision post-growth urban scenarios. Grounding reuse on such principles, it suggests the possibility to reorient the city development toward real goals of sustainability, namely toward socio-ecological transformations first aimed at citizens’ well-being and quality of life. All in all, this entails to open heritage-related ethics to new trajectories of thought and action.

Needless to say, this reorientation requires a revolution of values. Being condensers of stories, uses and expectations, cultural heritage places – and their making – offers themselves as super-grounds to reconfigure the relation between local and global dimensions. Looking at the well-known Outlook Tower by Patrick Geddes, from the heritage perspective, such relationality pinpoints the inseparability of the conservation work from the urban and architectural project and likewise to its cosmopolitan, world-scale discourse on how advance forms of living together on a limited planet (Sarkis et al., 2019). To test such potential, in this SI, we explore approaches, mechanisms and tactics that show ways to secure inclusive trajectories of heritage development in the reality of today’s Europe.

Touched heritage

Approaching heritage environments by means of adaptive reuse is an old urban motif that intersects the history of conservation, architecture and urban planning. However, in recent years, adaptive reuse has gained a particular momentum, attracting the interest of policymakers and renewing that of scholars. Although all too-often hampered, AHR is today translated into a multiplicity of terms (e.g. rehabilitation, regeneration and restoration) or hidden in normalized practices and policies of the European countries (Mérai et al., 2023). Nevertheless, the focus on heritage materiality still prevails over its intangible and relational dimension (Veldpaus et al., 2019). To overcome the crystallization of both the heritage and adaptive reuse discourse, it is important to focus attention on processual adaptation practice and theories (Plevoets and Van Cleempoel, 2019; Lanz and Pendlebury, 2022), which performativity reinforces relational (heritage) aesthetics (Bourriaud, 2002), characterized by unconventional forms of beauty.

It is self-evident that the openness mentioned above also needs to be conceptualized aesthetically to understand how AHR textures and forms generated by constellations of human and non-human agents (can) help to tackle the challenges of global change.

As the seminal contribution by Smith (2006), underlines the specialization of heritage-related disciplines has set the ground for the elaboration of aesthetical codes based on magniloquent spatial language, marking the distance between objects and agents and in doing so contributing to reduce this relation’s ability of performativity. However, today’s spatial disciplines converge on the need to confront with open forms, e.g. disordered, imperfect, low profile spatial experiences (Awan et al., 2011; Sendra and Sennett, 2022). After all, when heritage is touched, it is undoubtedly dared. Nonetheless, this goes far beyond the Frankenstein Syndrome, as coined by Wong (2017). While Wong’s monstrosity refers to inappropriate juxtapositions of old and new orders, the anomalies explored in this SI are forms of wonder emerging along the continuous processes of negotiations – whether spatial, political or economic. To recode the heritage project, such participated experiences, therefore, deserve renewed attention to understand the rationalities which drive these particular (often odd and sometimes terrifying) expressions of beauty, exploring their (potential) role in the city transition to sustainable development goals. In light of their experimental attitude as well as precariousness, these experiences, indeed, can be also conceived as niches of innovation (Grin et al., 2010), which introduce seeds of change in institutional and administrative environments. Letting their difficulties (scarcity, abandonment, precariousness and disuse) to come out, the oscillation between ethics and aesthetics becomes instrumental to challenge the flattening of AHR discourse (Stone, 2020) and, consequently, of the urban discourse. With this in mind, our attention is devoted to emerging active or community-driven forms of heritage adaptation that are pragmatic and progressive by nature. Posing emphasis on the values (ethics) and forms (aesthetics) of such projects, the SI focuses on transitional landscapes, both mental and physical, activated by means of AHR, presenting experiences which try to impact on large urban areas not only in economic and spatial terms but also – and mainly – in term of cooperation.

The aim is to navigate implications that go far beyond architecture, reaching out to controversial territorial aspects; to what extent are we willing to decrease our (material) expectations for the sake of more open, accessible cities to all, including the non-human? When does this become unfair and for whom? What is beauty, and why is beauty? In the sake of what values, some aesthetics are (not) acceptable? Where the borderline between gentrification and regeneration needs to be secured to create durable forms of commonality?

Dark vernacular

From the 2007 economic crash onward, informal and bottom-up practices of adaptive reuse have increasingly taken place in the remains of urban development, showing alternative possibilities of spatial production. Initially opposing more formal adaptive strategies, today they are all too often outdone by speculative interests but also increasingly (trying to be) integrated into institutional systems. Such temporary and participated approaches, indeed, have been gradually gaining attention from local authorities and developers, nurturing a growing body of architectural and urban studies. However, the tendency is to describe and to use such temporariness as part of the interim, provisional strategies to relaunch part of the city toward new permanent solutions driven by larger urban renewal. Questioning this assumption, we posit this transitional condition not as a starting point but as the way to do-orient heritage and the city toward desired trajectories of development. Among others, this issue, thus, introduces some of the possible organizational systems to make bottom-up practices possible and sustainable on the long term.

Following May and Holtorf (2020), we aim to proceed along the creative paths of uncertainty, convinced that in such space-time it is possible to unveil a political (democratic) project of abundance and enjoyment for current urban settlements. As underlined in the Charter on the built vernacular heritage (ICOMOS, 1999), unpredictable changes, continuous processes and adaptation are key elements to contrast the culture of homogenization dominating today’s design approaches. In this SI, our interest therefore aligns with Plevoets and Sowińska-Heima’s (2018) hypothesis, which proposes to conceptualize the current community-led adaptive reuse as today’s vernacular expressions. In this view, their significance lies in the potential to challenge more regular or “stiffed” AHR approach, by continuously moving among paradoxes: between scarcity and frugality, adaptation and conservation, individualism and collectivism and solidity and ephemera. Trapped in the urban battlefront between the establishment of new socio-ecological values and the rising of heritage-led forms of expulsion, AHR practices not only show their fragility in the long term but also illuminates the role of culture and heritage in gentrification processes while present ways to resist it. Conceiving AHR as a participative and open practice impacting at the territorial scale, we thus provide insights also to advance these two bodies of knowledge – resistance and gentrification – which in both heritage and urban studies are still under-conceptualized (Annunziata and Rivas-Alonso, 2018; Cesari and Dimova, 2019).

Taking the vernacular to extremes, moreover, the Refugee Heritage project challenges formal and universal principles followed by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in determining what is of outstanding value. At the XVII Architecture Biennale of Venice (2021), DAAR [2] encourages the decolonization of heritage from unique (nation-state) viewpoints, proposing to recognize the “dark present” of the Dheisheh refugee camp as World Heritage. Dheisheh is indeed one of the Palestinians refugee camps funded in 1949 that, DAAR states, today offers a historical perspective of a crime perpetuated as an ongoing event of displacement. According to the authors, the site meets the criteria IV and VI [3] indicated for the nomination of properties in the World Heritage List, being at the same time an expression of embodied memory, spatio-social-political form and the right to return (DAAR Hilal and Petti, 2021). Beyond the obvious dramatic condition, at the time of writing sadly on the spotlight, the proposal sheds light on the imaginative and experimental role of spontaneity in the heritage contexts, mobilizing not only land but also plural mindscapes in the creation of more ethical then aesthetical territories (Lingiardi, 2017; Anzani, 2020).

The significance of this experience for the European contexts is not as paradoxical as it seems at first. Favara Cultural Farm (FCF), for instance, is a culturally-led regeneration project, launched in 2014 in Favara, a medium-size town located in Sicily in the deep south of Italy. As the initiators state, FCF is “a platform of change” aimed to “reuse, regenerate, reinterpret, revitalise and cultivate” the resources of the city, suffering – as were many settlements around Italy – a severe depopulation trend due to the lack of opportunities, above all, in terms of work. Started in the city center of Favara, the project sheds light on an urban legacy characterized not only by historical architecture and public spaces but also to uncomfortable urban conditions, mainly illegally built and made of poor, low-cost construction materials. Treating such heritage in a laic way, namely free from absolute and pre-ordered judgments of value, FCF shows a way to deal with alternative values, tackling highly problematic urbanized areas comparable to several southern (among them Rome) and eastern European metropolitan territories.

In key recent contributions though, adaptive reuse and community are also considered limited or consolatory devices, all too often producing generic and commercial environments. As Desilvey notes in her often-cited book, Curated Decay, the concept of adaptive reuse “stops short of countenancing uses by other-than-human organisms and agencies” (Desilvey, 2017, p. 20). Exploring the relationships between life (death) and its protection, Boano points out the necessity to proceed along lifelines, namely along projects centered on life. Needless to say, this means to deal or work with all living things and the biosphere, and once again this is where AHR approaches seem to fail (Boano, 2022).

The adaptive approaches presented in this SI wants to contest these positions and open up the discourse by conceiving AHR as an evolving process, emerging in a continuously creative dialogue among human and non-human agents. For this to happen, the specialization of disciplines requires to be challenged as much as binary associations usually attached to the heritage context of beauty-good, order-health and close-security. Our goal is to discover unpleasant, sometimes monstrous aesthetics forms of protection that relocate the act of conservation into a wider idea of risk and time.

The openness of AHR projects proposed in this SI is thus instrumental to reinforce the bio-political implications of the heritage processes, aimed at sustaining urban-human change while protecting life through dynamic processes of conservation (Pulcini, 2013). As the reaction to COVID-19 has shown, the mobilization of living reuse processes might be an effective antidote to keep thriving under global disasters, contributing to create resilient urbanities (Fava, 2022a, b). Rethinking conservation through the lens of care ethics turns the spotlight on the hidden part of conservation work. Veldpaus and Szemző (2021) argue this has twofold implications. While protection (against harm) has always been at the core of conservation, a shift in its intention from conservation as “protection from” to a way of “caring for” the environment expands both the role and possibility of conservation; encouraging to go beyond the traditional approach, this opens up to plural ways of conservations to also introduce sometimes improper or dissonant uses, such as working, dwelling and creative demolishing.

Putting temporarily aside the obsession for objects, conservation thus becomes an affective work where caring for people and places is an inseparable matter. Despite their (apparently) minor character, though, the opaqueness of adaptive reuse experiences depicts a space of freedom to rethink spatial tools and practices (Boano, 2020), revolutionizing the oculocentric tradition that deeply underpinned the heritage discourse.

***

This SI was developed out of a curated session that Loes Veldpaus and I organized at the fifth Biennial Conference of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies (ACHS), held at University College London UCL in a virtual format. Our collaboration has grown within a European project titled OpenHeritage: Organizing, Promoting and ENabling HEritage Reuse through Inclusion, Technology, Access, Governance and Empowerment, funded under Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (2018–2023) [4]. Along the way, we followed different paths, and so did this SI, losing some contributions and integrating others that helped to reach a broad picture of how AHR is implicated in plural theoretical and practical fields.

In OpenHeritage, we explore cases and policies of AHR across various European countries, focusing on projects that are strongly people-oriented and confronting them with the realities of institutional heritage environments. The aim was to propose innovative forms of governance of AHR processes, advancing urban transformations based on three integration principles: economic, social and territorial.

At the 2020 ACHS Biennial, we wanted to expand the research work on a theoretical level to critically review the relations between the ethics and aesthetics of participated initiatives acting in the historic environment and thus, work in the interstice between conservation and regeneration.

The articles presented in this SI offer different perspectives with relation to the living processes of AHR, confronting them with multiple scales and spatial subjects. Some contributors have been intrigued by the ambivalent relation between gentrification and regeneration.

Mérai and Kukikov’s article, “Ruin Bars in Budapest,” portrays how the “ruining” aesthetic can be used as a form of conservation for historic buildings in the residential contexts. Exploring the benefit gained by certain stakeholder groups, Mérai and Kukikov demonstrate to what extent reusing unrenovated historical architecture can be an ethical practice. The broad range of consequences produced by this phenomenon was gradually absorbed by the creative economy sector and primarily impacted the habitability of the district. This brings about the urgency to think of governing heritage redevelopment in preventive terms, prioritizing those cooperative governance models, whether public or private (Szemző et al., 2022) and protecting the social value of the city.

van Knippenberg and Boonstra delve into the tensions that emerge in the redevelopment of Praga district in Warsaw where appealing industrial aesthetics have significantly contributed to the commodification of the area. Focusing on the community-led adaptive reuse, the authors debate how to contrast the erosion of the district’s cultural identity and accessibility through the process of awareness building based on heritage value education. Mitigation approaches emerges from the lab-based research conducted through the Praga Living Lab, activated under the above mentioned OpenHeritage project. Along with minor and self-organized initiatives, the Praga Lab has functioned as a cooperative devise; its pedagogical value becomes, especially, prominent in respect with a political context strongly oriented toward material and entrepreneurial stakes.

Comparing two socialist districts in Budapest and (still) Warsaw, Szemző and Sadowy’s analysis sheds light on the more-than-economic role of work in the heritage contexts. As a consequence of the transition from socialism in central and eastern Europe, from the late ’80s both cities were affected by a largescale deindustrialization process that also determined a radical reorganization of modes and cultures of work, opening the way to forms of modernization driven by the Western capitalist models of development. Addressed from this perspective, the creative transformation of Praga Nord (Warsaw) and Józsefváros (Budapest) shows the protective role of the creative work in preserving the authenticity of historic districts. Similarities in the aesthetical approach to such environments show not only ethical implications but also immaterial and changing heritage components, useful in updating or generating a new future legacy.

Expanding this discourse, a group of case studies in Flanders was used to grasp the sociocultural significance of heritage assets and adaptive reuse projects. De Ridder, Van Gils and Timmermans adopt an ethnographic method inspired by the a-hierarchical trajectories proposed by the actor-network theory. Responding to an assignment of the Flanders Heritage Agency, the goal of the study was to understand the functioning of heritage’s resonances, namely “the nature of social values” and thus, make them part of a politic of heritage. The authors propose three types of dialogues from the spontaneous to the increasingly structured to register the dynamic processes of valuing. Unsurprisingly, what emerges is the prominent role of everyday frequentation of heritage considering such issues as the porosity of public space, measured not only in terms of accessibility but also in respect with its performative capacity. In other words, the focus on “heritage social effects” depicts other significant elements to be considered in heritage management.

Some of the articles of this SI follow this multiplicative line of research to examine the political role of alternative heritage agents. The struggles driving new urban commons witness (Caciagli and Milan, 2021; Fava, 2022a) human and non-human performativity trigger an affective power that can be oriented toward plural directions and objectives. Intersecting such energies, what is of interest here are not only their political and cultural effect but also the impact on the articulation of more complex and untamed materiality.

Federico De Matteis draws on phenomenological theories to investigate instances of AHR in Brussel and Rome, and in so doing illuminates new forms of sensibility to think about in the adaptation process. Examining the atmospheric character or ruins, his article dives into the adaptive reuse of two industrial complexes, which transformation led to highly divergent results in terms of aesthetics as much as of experience: flattering and uncanny, inhabitable and habitable in many ways. What is under De Matteis’ lens is the atmospheric assemblage of AHR that serves to illuminate an affective relationality that opens up to a promising as much as controversial political implications, such those explored through the concept of behavioral city [5].

In foregrounding the means of landscape architecture, Annalisa Metta stands in at the intermediate design zone to challenge the dominant conception of adaptive reuse. The focus on the transformation of urban open spaces is instrumental to unfolding that “AHR” means being part of a continuous process of change, and, for this very reason, it requires an existential shift of both the project and the designer. Levering the intensity of the Italian lexicon, Metta’s contribution deepens the vocabulary of abandonment and thus reflects upon some selected cases developed in the last 40 years in Germany. AHR emerges as “one spatial practice,” namely an inextricably adaptive process that makes possible the coexistence of diverse types of architectural work (e.g. didactic, experimental and research), fields (e.g. conservation, biology and urbanism) and actors (e.g. user, makers, animal, human and non-human). The metaphor of the monster, which seems to be so tailorable to several case studies in this SI, is thus introduced to illuminate the hybrid nature of urban bodies ethically and aesthetically out of standards.

Francesca Lanz’s article considers other anomalous figures that are linked to difficult places such as mental asylums. Her personal and theoretical exploration of San Girolamo in Volterra (Italy), a former psychiatric hospital now abandoned, serves to demonstrate that AHR is a cultural process of transformation of the built environment. Lanz’s hypothesis relies on the recurrent metaphor of palimpsest to include the role of more-then-material interventions. The heterogeneity of the traces reads through San Girolamo and points out that architectural and conservation acts are strongly intertwined with “issue of memorialization, representation and communication” (Lanz). In contrast with the turistified imaginary put in place to present Volterra as a top-level touristic destination, rediscovering the abandoned asylum goes far beyond the passion for a “porn-like” heritage exploration. It indeed entails a political act brought forth from an often unwilling contemporary critique endorsed by means of AHR. In so doing, abandonment emerges as a creative and reconciliatory moment to elaborate causes of traumatic or difficult pasts, posing questions on how we (want to) inhabit our present and future.

Ranzato and Broggini go back to Germany to discuss with raumlabor, a group of architects–artists based in Berlin, about the Floating University Berlin (FUB). Awarded the Golden Lion in the 17th International Architecture Exhibition of Venice (2021), the FUB develops on the water retention basin originally regulating the Berlin Tempelhof Airport. If the Venice prize implicitly declares the architectural value of such project, also in terms of aesthetic. For the interests of this SI, the FUB makes a further opening of AHR practice, inhabiting an urban infrastructure still in function, considering water and its relationality as the main protagonists of this ever-mutating public space. Blurring the line between natural and cultural infrastructure, the FUB subverts the logic of both heritage and technological (un)making and management. From this viewpoint, adaptive reuse is instrumental to rehumanize current technoscapes informing them with new experimental meanings, including how to deal with climate and spatial and human change. The latter, as Holtorf (2018) posits, is fundamental to build cultural forms of resilience, namely cultural systems that are able to protect each other without stuffing their own future.

Figures

Plate 1

Il Nome del Mondo è Marea no. 1 by Gaia Ginevra Giorgi and the Tidal Garden

Plate 2

Il Nome del Mondo è Marea no. 2 by Gaia Ginevra Giorgi and the Tidal Garden

Plate 3

Il Nome del Mondo è Marea no. 3 by Gaia Ginevra Giorgi and the Tidal Garden

Plate 4

Il Nome del Mondo è Marea no. 4 by Gaia Ginevra Giorgi and the Tidal Garden

Plate 5

Il Nome del Mondo è Marea no. 5 by Gaia Ginevra Giorgi and the Tidal Garden

Notes

1. The cases presented by van Knippenberg and Boonstra, Mérai and Kulikov, Szemző and Sadowy are part of the EU-funded project entitled OpenHeritage: Organizing, Promoting and ENabling HEritage Reuse through Inclusion, Technology, Access, Governance and Empowerment. Loes Veldpaus and I were also research members of the project. For more details see: https://openheritage.eu

2. DAAR – Decolonizing Architecture Art Research is an artistic practice developed by Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti. DAAR is situated between architecture, art, pedagogy and politics. With the project Entity of Decolonization in Borgo Rizza (Sicily), in 2023 they received the Golden Lion for the best participation in the 18th International Architecture Exhibition entitled “The Laboratory of the Future.”

3. Accordingly, the authors argue: “(IV) Dheisheh Refugee Camp typologically embodies the memory of the Nakba, the longest and largest living displacement in the world, and is at the same time the expression of an exceptional spatial, social and political form. Be an outstanding example of a traditional human settlement, (VI) Dheisheh Refugee Camp is associated with an exceptional belief in the right of return, which has inspired both refugees and non-refugees from around the world in the struggle for justice and equality” (DAAR Hilal and Petti, 2021, p. 107).

4. See the website: https://openheritage.eu

5. I refer to concept introduced by Riccardo Viale and illustrated in the conference Behavioral city©. Connecting minds, spaces and policies held the 22nd November at the 2023 Venice biennale of Architecture. See more at: https://www.labiennale.org/en/news/behavioral-city%C2%A9-connecting-minds-spaces-and-policies