The Impact of Local Community Participation on The Success of Heritage Buildings Adaptive Reuse Projects

This paper aims at identifying the role that heritage buildings adaptive reuse can play in enhancing and improving quality of life of local communities, through improving the economic and social status, as well as the cultural awareness of their members. Heritage buildings adaptive reuse projects cost much higher than creating new structures, because of the high technical skills needed for implementing such works. This research is an attemptto prove that the return of those projects is worth the high costs expended on them. The main methodology that the research depended on is case study approach in order to provide tangible evidences on the positive effects of adaptive reuse projects on local host communities. After selecting four reused buildings as cases of study, Spatial Samples were taken from host communities of selected reused buildings. Since Sustainability is currently a global trend, this research value can be attributed to its contribution to attaching heritage buildings with that global trend of sustainability achievement through encouraging sustainable management of heritage buildings by reusing them to achieve economic returns that could be invested in the regular maintenance of those reused buildings; to ensure their survival. The Spatial Sampling type was used in this research. The first sample was taken from local host communities members surrounding the selected reused buildings, to find out whether they benefit from the activities offered by the adaptive reuse projects or not. And another sample was, then, taken from actual users of adaptive reuse projects, and the two surveys were analyzed to find out that adaptive reuse projects actually affected the quality of life of their users. But in fact, users were not from the adjacent communities which resulted from not involving them in the new use selection when initiating an adaptive reuse project. Those results established a new understanding of adaptive reuse project processes and pointed to the importance of involving local communities members in creating the selection criteria of the new uses of heritage buildings.