Developing a retail-reuse evaluation tool

Abstract

In many historic city centres, there is a tension between heritage preservation and retail development as historic buildings are often transformed with retail programmes. In such projects, many stakeholders are involved, all with different interests; investors are mainly interested in the revenues of the project and not in the conservation of the historic building, while conservators fear an over-use of the building without any respect for its value. But even if the owner chooses a qualitative conservation and restoration, the quality of the project is not automatically guaranteed. In many cases, the building will be rented out to a user who does not necessarily respect the specific characteristics of the building. In the case of a tenant, monument boards have almost no control over the use of the building after its restoration. The Retail-Reuse Evaluation Tool (R-RET) has been developed for evaluating such retail-reuse projects, taking into account the different aspects of such projects: heritage conservation, architecture, retail (design), and integration in the urban fabric. The first section of this paper describes the specific tension between retail development and heritage preservation in historic centres from the point of view of the different stakeholders. The second section described the development of the R-RET. The third section illustrates the applicability of the tool.