Resume: With the increasing concern for the reuse and sustainability of our cities, the idea of reusing the built heritage is gaining more and more importance. Our cities have a vast built heritage, vacant and unused, waiting for new uses, including listed heritage, buildings of moderate value and others of limited architectural importance. In this context, a systemic inventory of built heritage in the process of reuse at city scale makes total sense. The problem of resource efficiency imposes a sustainable integration in the urban and cultural context, and its inventory results in a useful tool both for understanding the reuse process in a long time and for the designing of new programmes.
The research is based on two complementary themes: one, an embryo project with the theme "Rehabit Convents in Lisbon. Built heritage, adaptive reuse and urban form transformation" (CIAUD, ref. UIDB/04008/2020, completed in 2023), aims to understand the capacity of convent buildings to be (re)adapted for housing; the other, with the theme "[re]Use the City! An operative chart to support the strategic transformation and integration of the obsolescent buildings", aims to explore the opportunity and operational repercussions of the reuse process of buildings and urban layouts within the Lisbon Metropolitan Area (AML).
Methodologically, the study seeks to establish a reconstructive and morphological analysis of the buildings and the urban form, documenting their successive stages of composition until the present, in particular their resilience to the introduction of different architectures, programmes and spatial organisation. This theoretical framework of methodological and practical hypotheses is intended to be an integral part of an information system on the reuse of the built fabric, vacant and unused, useful support for decision-making.
The hypothesis of conserving the urban built resource represents a fundamental step in policies and projects for the sustainable development of the city. It recognises the cycle and the existence of an evolutionary sense in the life of an object, reacts to decline, enables its reuse with new forms and functions capable of activating new life cycles.
