Experiences of adaptive reuse as model for hospitality development in emerging economies

In the mutable global context, different dynamics involve urban growth. If emerging economies increase their land consumption, often uncaring environmental values, in old Europe developed countries, forced by economical crisis and saturation of growing opportunities, are often obliged to withdraw inside their urban borders.
These countries, as Italy, seem to have exhausted today their further development potential and, as many other EU countries, suffer an unsustainable competition with the emerging economies on the global market. As a consequence, Italy today cannot certainly not be defined as an “emerging” economy, but at the most as a “submerging” one.
In this framework, the long experience in adaptive reuse of “sub-emerging” countries can help finding urban policies to follow in emerging ones, foreseeing trends and avoiding errors of the past.
Italy for instance, is obliged to constantly consider adaptive reuse for its huge built heritage.
In countertrend with the persistent crisis of the local building industry, a successful growing sector in this last decade has been the hospitality compartment, that encouraged the functional refurbishment of many different typologies of buildings, urban relicts and abandoned structures, into new hotels and resorts.
Some significant case-studies are the adaptive reuse in hotel of an eco-monster (concrete skeleton abandoned for 18 years) in the countryside near Treviso and the refurbishment of an old riverfront industrial building in Isola del Liri, with urban open spaces connecting to the urban context.
In addition to this, other functions related to hospitality, such as Wellness Centers, are often used for interesting adaptive refurbishments, involving obsolete structures and dismissed buildings.
All these experiences, proven in developed countries since long time, can be exploited to allow a sustainable model of development for emerging economies.