The Financial Sustainability a Cultural Heritage Adaptive Reuse Project in Public-Private Partnership

In recent decades, there has been a greater attention and awareness of the key role of the functional reuse of cultural heritage for the creation/sustainable development of cities, in a perspective of circular economic growth. However, interventions related to the enhancement of heritage involve complex decisions for the interests at stake and a persistent scarcity of public resources. The need to preserve the values of assets and to meet the rules relating to their protection, entailing high costs that discourage public and private investments for reuse interventions. It therefore becomes essential to support the decisions of reuse through adequate evaluation methodologies for the evaluation of the multidimensional impacts of the projects of functional reuse of cultural heritage in the circular economic perspective. This would allow public and private entities to recognize the value of heritage and their possible integration into the local economic system. In this context, the contribution proposes a methodological framework based on the integration of different decision support and evaluation methodologies, but which does not neglect the values historical and cultural, as well as economic and financial feasibility ones, to verify the involvement of private capital in the implementation and management of the intervention. The application of the methodology to a case study allows evaluating in the final phase the financial sustainability for the private sector, or if the investment for the redevelopment and reuse of the asset will be repaid through the management of the new configuration, selected through a path shared with the local community in the preliminary evaluation phase.