Heritage Conservation as Degrowth Practice: Multi-Scalar Analysis of Gasholder Adaptive Reuse in London and Edinburgh

Industrial heritage adaptive reuse occupies a structurally privileged position for degrowth: heritage listing already institutionalises material sufficiency as a regulatory obligation, mandating low intervention and resisting the demolish-and-replace logic of resource-intensive development. Yet this regulatory floor imposes no ceiling on how protected structures are programmed or who benefits; the same statutory instrument can produce different schemes depending entirely on governance. This paper demonstrates that gap through two contrasting UK gasholder adaptive reuse projects: King’s Cross Gasholders in London (private-led, luxury residential) and Granton Gasholder in Edinburgh (council-led community park). Applying De Castro Mazarro et al.’s multi-scalar degrowth framework across building, neighbourhood, and city scales through document analysis and site observations, we identify structural mechanisms explaining why building-scale alignment fails to propagate upward. The findings indicate three governance conditions are necessary to convert the structural degrowth potential of industrial heritage into substantive outcomes: public control over development decisions, community participation extended to strategic priorities rather than design preferences, and explicit integration of degrowth values into upstream planning frameworks. Industrial heritage adaptive reuse is not inherently a degrowth practice, but it is one of the few urban development contexts where the regulatory preconditions for degrowth alignment are already in place. Realising that potential requires governance structures that treat sufficiency and collective wellbeing as binding objectives, not rhetorical claims.