Preventive Conservation Strategy for Built Heritage Aimed at Sustainable Management and Local Development

Different European and international actions increasingly indicate the importance of sustainable approaches to manage the existing building stock and the role of built heritage in this process. Ongoing research in context of the UNESCO Chair on preventive conservation, maintenance and monitoring of monuments and sites (PRECOM³OS) demonstrates that built heritage preservation approaches still mainly focus on curative conservation and restorative treatments, which does not always result in the removal of causative factors or minimising their impact to preserve of heritage values. Once conserved or restored, the historic structure can return to an environment leading to further deterioration, likely requiring future interventions, and establishing a reactive pattern of treatment. An alternative approach is preventive conservation, which starts from periodic condition assessments, early damage detection and planned interventions to minimise deterioration and enable long-term resource efficiency.

While ample research advancements have been made on specific components dealing with sustainable development and preventive conservation, it remains unclear why preventive conservation approaches are not more widely disseminated and implemented in the built heritage field. This research therefore addresses the specific problem of operationalising preventive conservation in a sustainable development context. Herewith, the central research question is: What innovations and changes are required in the existing built heritage sector to operationalise a preventive conservation system aimed at sustainable management and local development?

The doctoral research resulted in a preventive conservation strategy (PRECO-Strat), which entails a relevant and new approach to implement innovations and changes in the existing built heritage sector. PRECO-Strat is based on 2 fundamental building blocks, i.e. (1) the Preventive Conservation System (PCS) which structures the impact of a preventive conservation approach on sustainable management and local development and (2) the Multi-Level Perspective (MLP) or quasi-evolutionary model based on sociotechnical innovations and evolutionary economics which demonstrates emergent innovation patterns and dynamics.

Throughout the research process, the multi-level perspective is implemented in 4 case studies which analyse the development of different preventive conservation system components in the built heritage sector. Next to the Flemish Region in Belgium as main case study, 3 smaller theoretically sampled case studies were analysed, i.e. (1) a maintenance campaign in Susudel, Ecuador (2) the Monza and Brianza distretto culturale in Italy and (3) a cluster preservation activities in Kuldīga old town, Latvia.

The research process demonstrates the effectiveness of the 2 building blocks in contributing to new knowledge on and understanding of the built heritage management sector as a complex system. The analysis based on the PCS holds diverse insights and provides the possibility to identify certain factors that are overlooked in the context of sustainable management and development. In addition, using the PCS in built heritage management case study research identified interventions and organisational mechanisms which appear effective but are inefficient in specific situations. The MLP application for the built heritage management sector generated a first set of innovation mechanisms and identifies factors facilitating or impeding improvement for specific local case studies. In addition, the MLP application demonstrates significant potential to enrich traditional approaches of assessing built heritage interventions and management decisions by identifying inefficiency in a larger and complex system.

The outcome of iteratively conducting empirical research and analysing practical case studies resulted in the identification of specific characteristics and commonalities of innovations and changes required to introduce a preventive conservation system in the existing built heritage sector. The research demonstrated that the most efficient mechanism to induce change is a sequence of smaller initiatives developed by a local frontrunner, starting from an operational level and immediate needs, with sufficient organisational autonomy, with an extensive amount of applications and within a specific geographical concentration. In contrast to these geographically or organisationally concentrated characteristics and commonalities, the long-term operationalisation of an innovation is a coevolution process. This implies that even if an optimal PRECO-Strat can be defined for a specific case study, it still requires adaptation and phasing out suboptimal components for operationalisation.

The main limit of this research process relates to the lack of long-term monitoring of innovation mechanisms and their impact. This research was primarily aimed at defining innovative models rather than a completely finalised and functional project. The results of this research can be further developed as a practical framework to understand local systems by means of long-term retrospective case studies and transition management as action research method.