Multicriteria Decision Tool for Sustainable Reuse of Industrial Heritage into Its Urban and Social Environment. Case Studies

Most of industrial heritage assets need new activities to ensure their survival. In addition, the collection of assets is very broad, many of their locations have now become central and are targets for speculation, and the nature of these sites displays great specialization. Consequently, processes for reusing these assets are necessary to conserve them, but they risk destroying features whose value has been inadequately identified. This work faces this multicriteria problem by adapting the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to create two independent criteria structures, one for heritage valuation and another for analyzing the spatial compatibility with new uses, and then connecting them considering the relations between criteria of both structures and the relevance of the heritage aspects involved. All this to select those activities that cause minimal harm to the heritage value to be conserved. This work analyses three case studies to evaluate the performance of a tool based on an adaptation of AHP. The results are exposed and some application guidelines are provided, since doubts in the way to applying and interpreting the criteria are in practice a common problem of this type of approaches and that is rarely addressed. Thus, this work shows the potential of the proposed tool as a resource for sustainable urban development strategies.