Seeking country consortium to join project on rethinking culture-led adaptive reuse: artists and cultural organisations in urban redevelopment

Contact if you have a full consortium: g.m.cavalieri@pl.hanze.nl

Cultural Commons Close By (working title) investigates how artists and cultural centres can become long-term actors in the adaptive reuse of underused buildings, former industrial sites and semi-public spaces. Across Europe, cultural organisations often reactivate vacant places through artistic practice, programming and community engagement, yet their role frequently remains temporary. They may generate significant social, cultural and spatial value without gaining the rights, resources or decision-making capacity needed to influence the future of the places they help transform.

The project shifts the focus from cultural activation to cultural stewardship. It asks how artists and cultural organisations can contribute not only to programming spaces, but also to their care, governance and adaptation. At the same time, it challenges the idea that one Cultural Stewardship Model can simply be replicated across Europe, since cultural centres are deeply shaped by local ownership structures, regulations, municipal cultures, funding systems, histories and communities.

Rather than developing one universal model, the project will identify and test a repertoire of stewardship mechanisms: ways of negotiating access and tenure, sharing maintenance and decision-making, involving artists in spatial transformation, building governance arrangements with municipalities and communities, and ensuring that cultural and social value can persist over time.

The central question is: How can artists and cultural centres become durable stewards of adaptively reused buildings and semi-public spaces, and which stewardship mechanisms can be transferred across European contexts without erasing the place-specific conditions on which successful cultural infrastructure depends?

The project will work through real-world pilots with different national focuses. In the Netherlands, the focus is on adaptive reuse in a rural or peri-urban context and the relationship between cultural infrastructure, heritage, landscape and local communities. In Sweden, the focus is on the transition from temporary, bottom-up cultural occupation towards more durable governance, co-maintenance and recognition. In Türkiye, an early-stage redevelopment of a former industrial site will test what changes when artists and cultural organisations are involved before spatial and governance arrangements are fixed. A fourth case will add a contrasting stewardship condition.

Artists are central not as providers of cultural programming around an otherwise technical redevelopment, but as actors in implementation: revealing overlooked uses, prototyping alternative spatial arrangements, working with reused materials, involving communities and mediating between municipalities, owners and local actors.

Positioned primarily within Circular Urban Economies, with a strong 15-minute City dimension, the project understands cultural centres as both reused urban assets and proximity-based neighbourhood infrastructure. Its main outcome will be a Comparative Cultural Stewardship Framework identifying what can travel between contexts, what must remain locally specific, and under which conditions artist-led adaptive reuse can become durable cultural infrastructure.

Ideally, each national cluster would include:

• a concrete pilot site, such as a cultural centre, adaptive reuse project, former industrial site or cultural space being developed;

• an NGO, citizens' organisation or community-based organisation connected to the site;

• artists, designers, art collectives or other cultural practitioners;

• a municipality or relevant urban public authority connecting the pilot to planning, policy and long-term implementation;

• a research institute, such as a university, university of applied sciences, public research institute or private research organisation;

• where relevant, private-sector actors involved in development, property or spatial transformation.

We are particularly keen to connect with national partner clusters in Türkiye, Poland, Hungary and Austria, especially where an existing or emerging cultural site can function as a real-world pilot and local cultural, civic, municipal and research actors can collaborate.

Across the sites, we aim to test a shared methodology while preserving local specificity. The objective is not to reproduce one model across Europe, but to compare different trajectories of culture-based redevelopment and identify which approaches are transferable, which depend on local conditions, and which governance arrangements support inclusive and durable adaptive reuse.