The circular economy and built environment. Maintenance, rehabilitation and adaptive reuse: challenging strategies for closing loops

This paper discusses attitudes towards maintenance, rehabilitation, and adaptive reuse as strategies to give new life to decaying and abandoned spatial and social contexts (World Economic Forum, 2018). The methodology is based on a mixed deductive and inductive approach, following three main steps: 1) conceptual framework; 2) design actions; 3) best practices screening. Through matching values preservation with resource optimization, life cycle lengthening emerges as a privileged medium for passing past identities to the future. Saving the performance of spaces or devices the approach suggested to fit best within a built system with high prior degrees of stiffness, working procedures, operators, and scheduled times. Integrating new systems and processes along side existing ones is a way to manage aging processes, as well as transferring, planning, and testing final suitability.