Adaptive Reuse as Configuration Knowledge: Design Intelligence in Seven European Post-Industrial Trajectories

Adaptive reuse of post-industrial heritage is often studied through technical performance, formal intervention strategies, or decision-support models. While these approaches clarify important aspects of reuse, they give limited attention to how projects evolve through the combined effects of architectural decisions, governance arrangements, financing mechanisms, policy instruments, social programs, and inherited fabric. This paper examines adaptive reuse as a time-structured project trajectory. It applies a hybrid methodology combining within-case reconstruction and comparative cross-case analysis to seven European projects in Brussels, Essen, Rotterdam, San Sebastián, Florence, Vienna, and Barcelona. The cases are analyzed across six dimensions: Asset & Context, Governance & Finance, Circularity, Social & Cultural, Policy & Design, and Outcomes & Transfer. The comparison shows that adaptive capacity depends on the alignment of governance, project time, and intervention strategy. Governance determines who can revise decisions and under what conditions; adaptation time is produced through funding horizons, approval procedures, institutional continuity, and civic or public stewardship; and strategies of retention, replacement, reversible insertion, and incremental occupation distribute future risk differently across project phases. From this synthesis, the paper extracts ten conditional lessons that frame adaptive reuse as configuration knowledge: transferable insights whose relevance depends on the interaction among governance capacity, temporal sequencing, inherited fabric, financing, policy support, and social objectives. The paper argues that knowledge transfer in adaptive reuse should be understood as disciplined translation across comparable constraints, not as the replication of models, rankings, or best-practice templates.