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The purpose of this paper is to adopt posthumanist perspectives on waste as traces of life to investigate how the alternative heritage work of redesigners transforms discarded building materials into reuse interior designs. It combines recent research on waste, shifting focus from representational and symbolic aspects to its material and indexical relations to human life, with critical perspectives emphasising heritage as encompassing different and ambiguous ways of engaging with material transformation over time.

Anthropological fieldwork involving participant observation was conducted over six months to closely examine the entanglement between redesigners and reuse materials in interior design work.

The sensory ethnographic approach reveals how materials are approached as unfolding processes rather than closed objects. Tracing how redesigners capitalise on the ambiguity of traces of life in building materials, the paper shows how uncertainty and risk are inevitable companions when working with reuse. To rehabilitate used things, and reassociate with materials classified as waste or heritage, means following their trajectories of becoming and responding to their signs of life. While involving important benefits, this often leads to the inconvenient and risky mess characteristic of an interconnected and entangled multispecies world.

Ethnographic analyses of reuse design are few. In particular, there is a lack of studies informed by posthumanist theories recognising the social and ecological embeddedness and mutual entanglement of humans and materials. By studying practices for extending the lifespan of salvaged materials external to formal heritage management this paper contributes with perspectives to revitalise heritage practices, while highlighting the neglect of socio-historic values of materials within circular economy.

The purpose of this paper is to address a gap in current heritage practice within the USA, as defined by the US Secretary of Interior’s Standards, which offers no treatment for a building entering the end of its lifecycle.

Building on research conducted for “Deconstructing the Culture of Demolition,” Master of Design Studies thesis completed in 2018, this paper seeks to better understand how deconstruction industry practice could be changed by the inclusion of heritage values through a case study of the sustainability non-profit Emergent Structures of Savanah, Georgia.

The benefits of replacing demolition with deconstruction extend beyond the preservation of materials alone. Applying critical heritage theories to deconstruction practice addresses challenging issues in the discipline, such as mutability of heritage objects and equity in heritage practice. Deconstruction redefines the concept of death in the built environment, harnessing its energy to serve the heritage goals of memory, revival and sustainable community development.

The findings are based on real-world practice, linking heritage methodology to deconstruction practice. These examples will be useful to preservation professionals who deal with demolition in the course of their work, to rethink the idea of waste and value in heritage practice.

This paper explores best practices in promoting heritage value and community engagement through deconstruction. This insight will promote interdisciplinary communication around historic materials and their treatment, which remains unexplored in both deconstruction and heritage research.

Building on the thematic intersection of architectural waste and conservation, the purpose of this paper is to look at the demolition and deconstruction of Honest Ed’s and Mirvish Village – an iconic site in downtown Toronto. In doing so, it examines contradictory site values and tensions inherent in sustainable heritage practices.

This article uses a “follow-the-thing” methodology – an approach developed by the cultural geographer Nicky Gregson (Gregson et al., 2009) – to demonstrate how engaging with processes of building demolition and deconstruction can begin to reveal the site’s multiple legacies.

Recognizing that materials are not lost, but instead move through and are determined by various physical, spatial and cultural conditions, this piece demonstrates how an attention to the choreography of demolition and deconstruction may deepen our understanding of notions of ownership, responsibility and stewardship.

Exposing material trajectories and various actors in the chain, this work challenges the save/discard binary which underpins conventional heritage practices and provides insight into new ways of considering the significance of demolition/deconstruction sites as well as broader social and environmental landscapes implicated in its reconfiguration.

Whereas heritage value is often defined in contrast with perceptions of loss, this piece suggests that engagement with processes of demolition and deconstruction constitutes a form of conservation that simultaneously acknowledges the difficult heritage of these procedures, while also commemorating the site’s ongoing transformation.

Purpose: In the experience economy, the main challenge for museums is not only to attract visitors but also to preserve artworks. Given this circumstance, this chapter aims to offer an overview of how these cultural organisations have emerged as labs of the future culture, where all kind of technological experiments are tested so as to fulfil their mission.

Design/methodology/approach: This chapter is based on extensive literature review on issues related to robots, artificial intelligence and service automation (RAISA) in the museum sector. Examples illustrate the role of technology in the experience design and preservation of cultural resources.

Findings: 1) A chronological framework of museums’ orientations is established to understand the evolution toward the technology-driven present period. 2) Robots, artificial intelligence and service automation have a meaningful contribution to make in guaranteeing visitor arrivals. 3) This technological phase requires a tourism workforce with new skills.

Research limitations/implications: Few academic studies concerning to the use of robots, artificial intelligence and service automation in the museum sector were found. Hence, more empirical studies are required to completely corroborate the chapter’s suggestions.

Practical implications: An enlightening path for the service design of multisensory and participatory is proposed, as a useful guide for heritage managers, marketing practitioners and tourism planners.

Originality/value: Museum management has been always receiving the attention of managers, policymakers, scholars, among others. Insights of how technology enhances heritage preservation and the improvement of museum services throughout numerous examples can direct them to increase knowledge and adopt these practices.

The considerable volume of rubble generated by the 2016–2017 earthquakes in central Italy reveals a significant issue in the post-disaster reconstruction phase. Drawing from the experience of Macerata province and the city of Camerino, the purpose of this paper is to explore a possible change of attitude in the reuse of heritage waste materials in the reconstruction process of damaged historical villages and towns in Italy.

This research outlines a comparison between national and regional directives on the rubble management on the one hand, and the praxis on the other, carrying out semi-structured interviews with experts who have been involved in the reconstruction process of Macerata province and Camerino, in Marche region.

The research reveals that the current vision in Italy for the management of disaster waste is still very close to the traditional paradigm that gives heritage waste an intrinsic value, worthy of great efforts for its collection, catalogue and preservation in view of the likely philological restoration of the damaged heritage. The most recent experiences in Camerino show that institutions responsible for the conservation of cultural heritage may accept a possible paradigm shift towards a more innovative and less expert-driven approach to heritage waste materials and their possible upcycling.

Within a critique of the traditional restoration paradigm, this article links disaster waste management to the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, to enhance the long-term sustainability of historical villages and towns in Italy.

Single-family houses in Vancouver that were built prior to 1940 are a cache of wood from British Columbia (BC) old-growth forests. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the environmental and heritage values of maintaining this finite resource, assess the current policy and regulatory efforts of the City of Vancouver to save this resource and recommend further opportunities to improve and expedite these efforts.

Using the City of Vancouver as a case study, this paper identifies effective policy practices to encourage and facilitate salvaging and reusing old wood resources. Additionally, the paper discusses the key challenges and risks that need to be addressed for these policy approaches to succeed.

Pre-1940 houses constitute about 40 percent of single-family houses that have been demolished in Vancouver in the past few years. The City of Vancouver enacted the Green Demolition Bylaw in 2014 requiring a minimum of 75 percent diversion of demolition waste. However, wood from these houses has been mainly chipped and recycled as biomass fuel or landscape mulch rather than reused. The result shows that regulatory enforcement along with support for infrastructure development may be crucial to protect the remainder of this valuable heritage resource.

This paper considers the environmental and heritage values of wood elements used in old houses and recommends further policy and regulatory interventions to maximize wood salvaging and reuse. Since protecting entire houses may not be always feasible, retention of wood elements is proposed as an alternative path for maintaining and cherishing this ancient and irreplaceable heritage.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the intersection of building material reuse and heritage value, and raises questions about how “preservation” has traditionally been defined and conceptualized. With a grounding in the realities of global climate change, the paper argues for further research on the topic and for the active engagement of the preservation field in reuse efforts.

After a review of existing literature, this study takes a descriptive and conceptual approach to explore the heritage values generated through material reuse.

This paper finds that processes of material reuse are richly embedded with heritage value and offer a conceptual challenge to established modes of heritage practice.

The findings of this paper suggest that heritage practitioners should actively engage with material reuse efforts to better understand the heritage values generated from such processes. Areas of future research and collaboration are identified.

Despite their intrinsic interaction with aged and existing infrastructure, there has been limited engagement in the heritage and preservation field with the topics of deconstruction, building material reuse, or construction and demolition waste practices more generally. This paper thus provides descriptive research on a topic that has been unevenly explored.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the relation between building conservation and circular economy (CE), which are often erroneously seen as inherently contradictory to one another.

The work draws from a comparative approach. The paper reviews a body of literature on architectural conservation and CE to establish an understanding on the state-of-the-art for both disciplines separately. Then, the relation between thereof is developed through a theoretical discourse.

Both architectural conservation and CE aim at safeguarding value, although they define “value” differently. Fabric-focused conservation and CE favor minimal intervention to material, albeit they arrive at this conclusion from different bases. Consequently, both approaches struggle with the low cost of virgin resource extraction and waste production and the high cost of human labor in contemporary Western societies. CE could be harnessed for building conservation by adopting its vocabulary and methodology, such as lifecycle assessment and material flow analysis. Transitioning toward CE can help increase the preservation of built heritage while redefining what is meant by “heritage” and “waste.”

Prior to this paper, there have been no articles addressing the relationship of the concepts explicitly and to this extent. The paper provides a theoretical basis for further discourse and outlines some implications of CE for the construction and built heritage disciplines.

Eight years of civil war in Syria severely impacted the historic core of Aleppo, with about 30 percent of its buildings completely destroyed and huge amounts of debris generated. This paper proposes recovery strategies for some of the most badly damaged sites in the city through material reuse and transformation, one of the goals of which is to ensure the continuity of the city’s urban cultural heritage. The purpose of this paper is to presents not only risks but also opportunities with respect to the integration of technologies to support recovery and reconstruction.

The paper analyzes the current situation in the Old City of Aleppo by identifying the most seriously damaged sites, namely those that have sustained damage to between 80 and 100 percent of the site. It reviews comparable international post-disaster examples and investigates appropriate options for dealing with the damage caused by the war and the management of debris, with consideration given to minimal intervention, the retention of structural integrity, technology and the integration of historic materials within new components and buildings. The methodology has relied on research through field work, including interviews with stakeholders in Aleppo.

The paper proposes two strategies to guide post-war rebuilding and conservation efforts in the Old City of Aleppo through: the creation of new multi-purpose, public open spaces and the use of debris in the repair of buildings and construction of new components and buildings, including infrastructure for solar panels within the new public spaces.

This paper contributes to the development of a post-civil war sustainable material recovery approach for the Old City of Aleppo and for Syria more generally, where a disaster waste management strategy is still in development.