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Introduction
In Italy, urban renewal is a consolidated practice, such as shown in the redevelopment of Porto Antico in Genoa (Kupka, 2012). For historical and cultural assets, Italy has always supported maintenance and preservation. The practice has been to focus on conservation and rehabilitation of buildings and areas, aiming to conserve the object as well as possible.
Transformation is a much debated topic, but while on the one hand transformation on urban scale is common, on the other hand transformation of existing buildings is not often taking place, in particular not conversion into housing. In this paper, the words transformation and conversion define every physical intervention in existing buildings that implies a change in use.
Adaptive reuse is related to the change in use of an existing building, to the maintenance of the structure of the building, and to the extension of the buildings lifespan (Ball, 2002; Mansfield, 2002; Douglas, 2006; Bullen, 2007). Adaptive reuse can take place "within use", which means without changing the original function, or "across use", which implies a new function (Ellison and Sayce, 2007). For example, an office building can undergo adaptive reuse, through an improvement of its characteristics, and still be an office buildings or it can change use. Douglas (2006) defines the adaptation of a building as any significant change to an existing building function when the former function has become obsolete. It is any intervention to change the capacity, functionality or performance, to fix, improve or reuse a building according to new conditions or requirements (Langston et al. , 2008). This kind of intervention in existing buildings is not novel. Historically, reuse happened anywhere and anytime contributing to the realisation of the cities and historical buildings that everyone love (Remøy, 2010).
Adaptive reuse is a special form of refurbishment that poses challenges for designers. Changing the function of a building often introduces new conditions and sometimes requires new permits and deviation from the land use plan (Langston et al. , 2008).
To stimulate adaptive reuse, tools and procedures are needed that allow enhancement of heritage, in order to pursue aims of energy consumption and low land use. A high number of buildings is obsolete and inefficient from a structural, energetic, aesthetic and environmental point of view....