A holistic approach for the adaptive reuse project selection: The case of the former Enel power station in Bari

The refurbishment and regeneration of unused building stock, with particular attention to the historical industrial heritage, is becoming an issue increasingly influential in the strategic choices for the development of sustainable cities. In particular, the regeneration of warehouses and historic buildings, allows to preserve the memory of past architecture characters, converting them into new functional centres within the urban structure. Adaptive reuse is an important design strategy for achieving sustainability as it ensures a continuous building life cycle and prevents building destruction. On the other hand, an exhaustive approach to select the best adaptive reuse project, involving many qualitative and quantitative parameters is missing in related literature. This paper proposes a holistic approach for the selection of the adaptive reuse project strategies based on a suitable index and calibrated through the application of the Optimised Analytic Hierarchy Process (O-AHP) Model. The main novelty of the proposed research are threefold: i) for the first time the importance of a large number of parameters involved in the adaptive reuse project selection has been quantified according to two different panels of experts, ii) a shared priority is demonstrated by comparing the vision of Academics and Professionals; iii) a new index is calibrated on the basis of the obtained parameters importance to support the adaptive reuse project selection of dismissed industrial areas. The proposed approach considers both qualitative and quantitative data in the analysis and is calibrated according to two homogeneous panels of 30 experts (15 Academics and 15 Professionals) in the field. In order to show the potential of the proposed index, the choice of the ideal design solution of the former Enel power plant in Bari (Italy) is individuated among six project proposal of the conversion.