Territorial Inequalities in Adaptive Reuse Opportunities: Evidence from Lombardy Region (Italy)

In recent years, the official and academic debate has focused on heritage adaptive reuse as a strategic driver to promote sustainable territorial development by fostering local communities’ sense of belonging, creating economic opportunities, and embracing the circular economy paradigm in territorial transformations. Despite the focus, many marginal areas still struggle to capture benefits from reusing built heritage assets, thus highlighting the need for new knowledge bases and decision-support tools for the policy realm. In this context, the paper aims to answer this need by proposing a methodological tool, inspired by a mass appraisal logic, to assess economic opportunities related to reusing abandoned heritage properties at large administrative scales. Such a tool can help analyze and quantify imbalances between urban and marginal areas, providing preliminary information that supports effective funding allocation and heritage-based policy design for spatial justice. The tool’s preliminary application to a subset of abandoned heritage properties in the Lombardy Region (Italy) demonstrates its potential for heritage-based territorial cohesion policies, together with the limits and future research challenges toward its spreading and effective implementation as a decision-making tool.