The Catalyst Historic Building in Urban Development

Abstract

The sustainability of cultural heritage assets-especially historic buildings-becomes a vital part in development plans. Contemporary approaches focus on depending special interventions to achieve balance between conserving and utilizing these assets, in a way activating their catalyst role within sustainable urban development plans. Locally, these buildings suffer from negligence, and lack of clear polices to deal with them as a catalyst elements. Thus, the research aims to build a framework for the catalyst historic buildings showing the different intervention types to activate the catalyst role of the different types of historic buildings. The research hypothesis is represented by the differentiation of the historic buildings' type has an impact on the type of the used intervention, and the nature of the catalyst role of the historic building. The analytic approach has been applied on four different elected projects. Each one represents a different type of catalyzation and building type. This research shows that the increase in the distinctiveness of the historic building is accompanied by an increase in its catalyst role as focal point on the planning level, while the buildings with contextual value play catalyst role as guiding elements on the local level. The role itself varies according to the nature of the context.