Public Heritage in Transformation. Atlas of a Changing City

Abstract

Public Heritage in Transformation inaugurates a three-volume series that explores public heritage as an interpretative framework for understanding the contemporary city. This editorial challenges the conventional view of disused heritage as a condition of decline or merely a preliminary stage leading to adaptive reuse. Instead, it proposes that periods of disuse should be understood as a transitional phase capable of revealing the economic, social, and institutional transformations reshaping urban space. The crisis of the functionalist paradigm gives rise to a new interpretative category, availability, understood as the capacity of buildings to endure over time without being confined to a single, predetermined function. From this perspective emerges a grammar of transformation based on a range of complementary strategies – including urban regeneration, conservation of suspension, temporary use, renaturalisation, and adaptive reuse – that acknowledges the value of heritage even during periods of inactivity. The contributions collected in this volume are presented as the plates of a critical atlas, in which research, design projects, and theoretical reflections map an interdisciplinary geography of public heritage transformations. Rather than offering a taxonomy of case studies, the volume proposes a new cultural and design paradigm grounded in the relationship between heritage, the city, and the common good, while introducing the themes that will be further developed in the subsequent volumes.