CLIC Midterm Conference

The International Mid-term Conference “Heritage Adaptive Reuse and Circular Economy” was organized by the Municipality of Rijeka and University of Nova Gorica. It focused on the main topics of CLIC project: 1) adaptive reuse; 2) circular economy in urban development; 3) historic urban landscape and sustainability as well as 4) the challenges of the cities in terms of policies, projects and tools especially in the context of Rijeka European Capital of Culture 2020.

The conference tackled the above topics through an ad-hoc perspective, given by the case study of Rijeka, European Cultural Capital in 2020 that has already undertaken numerous redevelopment projects at different scales and member of the CLIC consortium, as well as through an international practices exchange, by presenting different ongoing initiatives in Europe and abroad.

With a broad international audience and speakers, including national and international experts on the CLIC topics, as well as students, professionals, academics, policymakers, researches, NGOs and other stakeholders from Rijeka and Croatia, the conference provided deep insight to the city of Rijeka and its current activities in the field of cultural valorization and adaptive reuse and included also the study visits to the main pilot sites of Rijeka and its Historic Urban Landscape (Ship Galeb, RiHub, Astronomical Centre Rijeka, new cultural quarter emerging within the ECOC 2020 – Museum of modern and contemporary art, Industrial area of Energana and Rječina River).

The different sessions focused on urban cultural capital and development; cultural heritage sustainability through experience economy; heritage management and urban planning challenges. Additionally, the Conference shared successful stories, case studies and other EU projects dealing with circular economy (ROCK, RURITAGE, Forget Heritage, URBiNAT), heritage management and adaptive reuse – Re-use Center Ljubljana, H-farm, ROTOR. It provided a necessary forum both for current projects and practice and enabled the discussion of models, innovation and tools.

Conference Video