Reintegrating Marginalized Rural Heritage: The Adaptive Potential of Barn Districts in Central Europe’s Cultural Landscapes

Barn districts—ensembles of agricultural buildings situated at the edges of rural settlements—once played a key role in the spatial and economic organization of agrarian communities in Central Europe. Today, many of these structures remain marginalized and underexplored in contemporary landscape and heritage planning. This paper presents a comparative study of six barn districts in Poland’s Kraków-Częstochowa Upland, where vernacular construction, ecological adaptation, and local tradition shaped distinctive rural–urban interfaces. We applied a mixed-methods approach combining cartographic and archival analysis, field surveys, and interviews with residents and experts. The research reveals consistent patterns of landscape transformation, functional decline, and latent adaptive potential across varied morphological and material typologies. Despite differing levels of preservation, barn districts retain symbolic, spatial, and socio-cultural value for communities and local landscapes. The study emphasizes the importance of reintegrating these marginal heritage structures through adaptive reuse strategies rooted in the values of the New European Bauhaus—sustainability, aesthetics, and inclusion. The findings contribute to broader discussions on rural socio-ecological resilience and landscape-based development, highlighting how place-based strategies can bridge past identities with future-oriented spatial planning.